MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.3.96.970614034259.24228C-100000@uxp1.hrz.uni-dortmund.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
In-Reply-To:  <199706132120.XAA00649@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de>
Date:         Sat, 14 Jun 1997 03:58:16 +0200
From: Werner Lemberg <xlwy01@UXP1.HRZ.UNI-DORTMUND.DE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Re: Multilingual TeX --- and a successor to TeX
Status: R

On Fri, 13 Jun 1997, Frank Mittelbach wrote:

> the reason is that TeX does support several hyphenation patterns but
> unfortunately it uses the lccode table during hyphenation and it
> doesn't support several lccode tables. even worse: it looks at this
> table only at the end of a paragraph. as a result, if you have a
> paragraph that mixes several languages then all languages might be
> hyphenated according their correct hyphenation patterns, BUT before
> this happens all words are translated to lowercase using the lccode
> table for the LAST language in the paragraph. That makes the result
> quite arbitrary.

Vladimir, have you looked at the T2 proposal for Russian (look at
http://www.iai.rssi.ru/berd/table)? They use the default \lccode and
\uccode layout. It will not solve all problems with languages using
the Cyrillic script (and extensions of it), but at least you can avoid bad
hyphenation.

> c) is the situation where i think we can get to as long as we use TeX
> as a basis and it is the scheme i intend to adopt for the new language
> interface for LaTeX for which the conceptual work is mostly done and
> trial implementation is done in parts.

Hear, hear! Of course I will not ask you when something is available for
testing :-)

> what i would hope (but i fear in
> vain) is that we take Omega and extend it with the e-tex features as
> they are now and freeze that (FREEZE!) or vice versa and then we have
> something that we could promote and more importantly could use to
> develop serious code for, eg the LaTeX kernel.

Merging seems not to be a great problem IMHO since Omega and e-TeX attack
completely different problems. But why freeze? Neihter e-TeX nor Omega is
finished yet. Perhaps e-TeX can promise that certain features it has been
added will not change anymore, but with Omega this isn't true. The authors
are developing new metrics file (which are definitely needed for
sophisticated (non-Latin) script processing---think of Urdu, vertical
typesetting et al.), and I'm sure that a lot of other things will need
further improvements then.

> reliably this can right now only be solved by using uppercase fonts in
> such places. Or, using Omega ...

Yeah, the uppercase problem is _really_ solved with Omega, and this will
not change in the future (except that the Omega command names can change
or the format of the OTP files or... :-)


    Werner