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Date:         Sun, 15 Jun 1997 23:45:34 +0200
From: Werner Lemberg <xlwy01@UXP1.HRZ.UNI-DORTMUND.DE>
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: Multilingual TeX --- and a successor to TeX
Status: R

On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Vladimir Volovich wrote:

> > > Both approaches work well (the former I've used in my vncmr package for
> > > Vietnamese to define an ET5 encoding, the latter for a experimental LLW
> > > encoding using the `fil' option of the LH fonts to get more characters)
> > > for *all* encodings in the range 0x80-0xFF since the interface used here
> > > for TeX is only 7bit, and \uccode and \lccode for characters >= 0x80 will
> > > be never used.
> >
> > This is misleading, sorry. Of course I meant case changing only. For
> > proper hyphenation you still need T2 encoded fonts if you don't want to
> > change the lccodes.
>
> Then, if we assume the default lccode and uccode values for characters 0x00..0x7f,
> then \uppercase and \lowercase will work properly independently of lccode and uccode
> settings for characters 0x80..0xff?
> Is that what you meant by the phrase "both approaches work well for *all* encodings"?
> Then I did not catch the idea, why "for proper hyphenation you still need T2 encoded fonts"?

Not \uppercase and \lowercase but \MakeUppercase and \MakeLowercase. And
yes, casification will work independently of \lccodes and \uccodes in the
range 0x80..0xff with the code fragments I've sent previously. But since
hyphenation *always* use \lccode this trick will fail.

> BTW, is a ET5 encoding similar to LWN encoding in sence of using sequences
> of latin letters to typeset vietnamese letters via ligatures?
> How many letters are there in vietmamese alphabet?
> And what about Chinese? (are the principles the same there, too?) ;-)

Vietnamese has about 160 letters. ET5 encoded fonts use no ligatures
(besides the original cm ones); all accented characters are precomposed,
and you should use a Vietnamese input encoding (or Mule) to input.

Chinese Big 5 encoding has more than 13000 characters---my CJK package
needs 55 subfonts to represent it.

ET5 only works because Vietnamese basically has no hyphenation. The
same is true for CJK languages.

> It is also interesting to know, is this `latin based' encoding popular
> in Vietnam?

What do you mean with `latin based'? Vietnamese is the only south-Asian
script written with Latin letters!

> I'd like to say, that I'm 99.99% sure that the LWN encoding will not be widely
> used as a native encoding in Russia (where Russian language is the main).
> The LWN encoding (and all other `latin-based' russian encodings) is
> only useful for typesetting small text pieces (such as bibliography references)
> in a big non-russian text. Or maybe, when there are no packages available
> to russify screen fonts and keyboard.

I fully agree.


    Werner