Message-Id: <199402021249.AA16443@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  Your message of "Wed,
              02 Feb 94 11:49:54 GMT." <01H8ESZK0B029PM3LM@research.ptt.nl>
Date:         Wed, 2 Feb 1994 13:05:45 +0100
From: "Johannes L. Braams" <J.L.Braams@research.ptt.nl>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Language numbers
Status: R

On Wednesday, February 2 CHAA006@VAX.RHBNC.AC.UK wrote:

> I think a little supplementary information may be in order.  The functionalit
> y
> to which David refers is surely fundamental, being defined in Plain.TeX rathe
> r
> than being dependent on the use of Babel.  The latter may well be a wonderful
> package for multilingual TeX, but Knuth himself had the forsight to provide t
> he
> \newlanguage macro...
>
>                                         Philip Taylor, RHBNC
What you write is true Phil, but Babel provides an interface to easily
switch between languages.  At the lowest level it also gives you the
opportunity to simply list the languages for which you have
hyphenation patterns in a file, which is processed at iniTeX time.

And babel can also be used with formats other than LaTeX, although
everybody seems to think it is meant only for LaTeX users. I try to
keep it compatible with all plain based formats.

        Johannes Braams

PTT Research,                           P.O. box 421,
2260 AK Leidschendam,                   The Netherlands.
Phone    : +31 70 3325051               E-mail : J.L.Braams@research.ptt.nl
Fax      : +31 70 3326477
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