Re: [PATCH] ox-latex.el: Unify in one single list Babel and Polyglossia languages alists

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Ihor Radchenko writes:

> Do you refer to the paragraph below when saying that Org implementation
> makes it hard to add new features? The rest of the above paragraph
> implies that the difficulty is on LaTeX side, not on Org side.

Sorry for not explaining clearly. Actually I think the problem is not
with Org or Babel (LaTeX), but rather with the "translation" from Babel
(latex) to Org. Currently the babel interface is more complex, although
it is more consistent and robust within LaTeX. The challenge is how to
style all of that for an Org user who wants to just get a correct PDF
out-of-the-box using a simple and basic syntax (of course, you don't
need to translate the whole babel: to use babel with all its power it's
better to write the LaTeX code directly). 

For that reason I think that, for now, it is more practical to keep the
old babel syntax on the Org side (as I do in my patch):

\usepackage[langs]{babel}

which is perfectly valid for pdflatex, lualatex and xelatex (except in
the languages that are loaded in babel through ini files).

> In any case, your existing patch is an already an improvement. I do not
> deem it as requirement to apply the patch.

Well, between today and tomorrow I can prepare a new version of the
patch with all your suggestions from the previous email incorporated.
And for the future I can work on a fresh re-implementation of all this,
using the :options-alist export property, as you suggest.

For example, something like this:

latex-lang: babel(sorbian) variant(upper) provide(hebrew:import,hyphenrules=+) 
options(bidi=default), others(french,catalan) 

returns:

\usepackage[french,catalan,uppersorbian,bidi=default]{babel}
\babelprovide[import,hyphenrules=+]{hebrew}

or this (in this case Hebrew is the main language):

latex-lang: babel provide(hebrew:main,import,hyphenrules=+) 
options(bidi=default), others(french,catalan) 

returns:

\usepackage[french,catalan,bidi=default]{babel}
\babelprovide[main,import,hyphenrules=+]{hebrew}

And the above is equivalent to:

latex-lang: babel(hebrew) options(bidi=default,provide=*), 
others(french,catalan) 

returns:

\usepackage[french,catalan,hebrew,bidi=default,provide=*]{babel}

Note that for monolingual documents, now in babel it would be enough to
indicate the language in the document class options (only for LuaTeX and
XeTeX), so it would be enough to do something like this:

#+latex_class: article
#+latex_class_options: [french,10pt,draft]
#+LaTeX_Header: \usepackage{babel}


Best regards,

Juan Manuel