Re: XeTeX 1.0 - request for comments

On 19.10.2005, at 21:49, William F. Adams wrote:

> On Oct 19, 2005, at 2:21 PM, Florian Grammel wrote:
>
> > Another wish would be a macro that gives replacement patterns for 
> > ligatures like fi, fl,...(as long as the fonts don't include them) 
> > and perhaps also for the common shorthands like -- --- `` ''. As for 
> > the quotation marks it would really be very nice to be able to choose 
> > which real marks they will be expanded to. (Or is this yet available 
> > and I just don't know how to do it?)
>
> That's what the ``mapping=tex-text'' option in a font declaration does.
>
> William
Unless I am mistaken, your  answer is true only for the first part of 
the quote.

I would also love to see the option to expand the quotation marks 
depending on the language.
Let's take Czech for example:

In CsLaTeX I can say \csprimeson and \csprimesoff to typeset Czech 
quotation marks.
In XeLaTeX with Fontspec I would love "mapping=tex-text" to change the 
behavoir depending on locale specified by babel or \XeTeXlocale "cs", 
or something like that. CsLaTeX uses \usepackage{czech} for this.

Ideally this would also control all the features provided by CsLaTeX, 
but I don't know if it is possible, or how hard it would be. We have 
some special typographic rules, controled by  Cs(La)TeX: In adition to 
different quotation marks, in dividing words like propan-butan the 
hyphen can (and should) be typed on the end of line 1 as well as on the 
begining of line 2.
You can limit the minimal number of characters before and after hyphen 
(usually 2 and 3 respectivelly).
There are some more things, like controlling of localization of 
headings, dates etc.
For those, who can understand it (I can't unfortunatelly), the 
implementation is here:
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/csplain/czech.sty

Being just a user, I am not sure some of these things are not possible 
now.
In case they are not, is this a reasonable thing to include them in 
future XeTeX?

Regards,
Pavel