Bug#492366: dlatex - BTS reports 492365/6: XeTex problems for hebrew and greek

[Andreas Hoenen]

Hi Benoît and Martin,

regarding the two bug reports about XeTeX problems for hebrew and greek
documents (meanwhile more than one year old):

My first analysis was font problems to be resolved with the planned
XeTeX fontspec encoder.  Meanwhile I think that this is misdirecting,
sorry: the DejaVu fonts used with XeTeX support hebrew and greek out of
the box.

With TexLive 2009 that is in the process of being packaged for Debian
(at a very early stage [3]) and the included Polyglossia package (the
TexLive 2007 version currently included in Debian doesn't contain
Polyglossia) I have managed to produce pdfs for the hebrew and the greek
test documents after replacing Babel with Polyglossia — I needed to
patch the TeX output of dblatex and to run xelatex manually:

$ dblatex -d -b xetex -P doc.collab.show=0 -P latex.output.revhistory=0 -P 
doc.toc.show=0 test-he.dbk
$ cd <temporary dblatex work dir>
$ <patch test-he.dbk.tex>
$ xelatex test-he.dbk.tex

Attached are the hebrew [4] and greek [5] patch files.  Please note that
this is a crude hack only meant as a proof of concept: using Polyglossia
instead of Babel with the XeTeX backend will support further languages.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/492365
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/492366
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-tex-maint/2009/10/msg00067.html
[4] 
--- test-he.dbk.tex     2009-10-14 09:43:33.000000000 +0200
+++ /home/ah/pbuilder/polyglossia/bindmount/hebrew/hebrew.work.tex      
2009-10-13 16:56:41.000000000 +0200
@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
   }
   \ifxetex
 \usepackage{fontspec}
-\usepackage{xltxtra}
+%\usepackage{xltxtra}
 \setmainfont{DejaVu Serif}
 \setsansfont{DejaVu Sans}
 \setmonofont{DejaVu Sans Mono}
@@ -25,9 +25,15 @@
 \fi
 \usepackage{fancybox}
 \usepackage{makeidx}
-\usepackage[hebrew]{babel}
+%\usepackage[hebrew]{babel}
 \usepackage{cmap}
 \usepackage[hyperlink]{docbook}
+\ifxetex
+  \usepackage{polyglossia}
+  \setdefaultlanguage{hebrew}
+  \newfontfamily\hebrewfont{DejaVu Sans}
+  \usepackage{xltxtra}
+\fi
 \setuplocale{he}
 \setupbabel{he}
 \renewcommand{\DBKreleaseinfo}{}

[5] 
--- test-el.dbk.tex     2009-10-14 09:50:05.000000000 +0200
+++ /home/ah/pbuilder/polyglossia/bindmount/greek/greek.work.tex        
2009-10-13 17:04:27.000000000 +0200
@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
   }
   \ifxetex
 \usepackage{fontspec}
-\usepackage{xltxtra}
+%\usepackage{xltxtra}
 \setmainfont{DejaVu Serif}
 \setsansfont{DejaVu Sans}
 \setmonofont{DejaVu Sans Mono}
@@ -25,9 +25,14 @@
 \fi
 \usepackage{fancybox}
 \usepackage{makeidx}
-\usepackage[greek]{babel}
+%\usepackage[greek]{babel}
 \usepackage{cmap}
 \usepackage[hyperlink]{docbook}
+\ifxetex
+  \usepackage{polyglossia}
+  \setdefaultlanguage{greek}
+  \usepackage{xltxtra}
+\fi
 \setuplocale{el}
 \setupbabel{el}
 \renewcommand{\DBKreleaseinfo}{}

Regards, Andreas
-- 
Andreas Hoenen <andr...@hoenen-terstappen.de>
GPG: 1024D/B888D2CE
     A4A6 E8B5 593A E89B 496B
     82F0 728D 8B7E B888 D2CE

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