>> Can someone clarify when polyglossia is the only solution (if that's >> ever the case)? > > When non-western scripts are involved. In this cases the babel > language files include font encoding switches (e.g. greek uses LGR, > russian some cyrillic encoding). This clashes with the use of > "unicode fonts" and fontspec.
After some attempts to make compatible babel and xelatex my impression is that the only real problem is the LICR and the mapping from things like \cyra to the corresponding actual char. I was able to typeset a text in Russian with babel/xelatex with this mapping. Cheers Javier -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex