Message-Id: <199401261445.AA06657@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  <9401261407.AB06791@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> (message from Mike Piff on
              Wed, 26 Jan 1994 13:25:00 LCL)
Date:         Wed, 26 Jan 1994 14:43:12 GMT
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@cs.man.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Changing default preloads
Status: R

Mike:
  True, I had forgotten that TeX can't read patterns, only iniTeX. But
  now the problem is even bigger, as all possible languages have to be
  pre-loaded for portability.

No you dont need to load all patterns, but documents are flagged so
you know when you need to build a new format.

I dont plan to build German hyphenation in to my local set up (or UK
English for that matter)

But if I get a document that says

\usepackage[german]{babel}

I can tell straight away that either I need to build a new format, or
put up with bad line breaks.

If the German site had built in german as default, the document
wouldnt have been flagged in this way, and I would not have known what
to do. (I can not tell German from Dutch, having a typically English
mastery of these languages).

The problem is worse for UK English. If you make UK English
hyphenation the default at Sheffield (and your users will forget this)
then when they `hand tune' their documents to get ideal page breaks
(yes people do do this) they will not work at most other sites, and
it will be very hard to tell the cause, the log files will not give
this information.

No one objects (much) to writing \documentstyle or \documentclass at
the front of every document, so why do you object to a couple of other
declarations setting up encodings/languages/papersize etc ?

David