LATEX-L Archives

Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project

LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE

Options: Use Forum View

Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Werner Lemberg <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 15 Jun 1997 14:20:01 +0200
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (110 lines)
On Sun, 15 Jun 1997, Vladimir Volovich wrote:

> I meant the following: if somebody uses _only_ russian as a language
> with letters with codes > 0x80, then _why_ should he have in mind
> some `default' lccode+uccode settings for charactets > 0x80,
> especially if these settings conflict with the common russian encodings?
> IMHO in this case it is not too bad to allow to change lccodes+uccodes.

Have a look into my CJK package. Besides support for Chinese etc. you will
find an interface for Mule which allows the use of various latin encodings
(and Vietnamese) at the same time. My goal is to extend this---there are
so many language specific solutions which can't be made more general (e.g.
Japanese TeX). I don't like this, and I will always try to find a
multilingual solution. For example, you can embed Babel seamlessly into
the CJK package (provided you have only 7bit input encoding for non-CJK
languages: this will be done by the Mule-CJK interface).

> At least, I think that LCY encoding which is currently used in LH
> fonts should be defined in Babel (among other cyrillic encodings encluding T2).
> And in this LCY encoding it is very useful to have russian letters
> to stay _real_ letters (not active chars). And therefore one needs
> to change lccode and uccode before switching to LCY (and restore
> the defaults before switching to another language).
> I'm finishing this work now.

I will take a look how you've solved it.

> Moreover, do the _one_ default lccode+uccode settings conform to _all_
> languages (which are already TeXized)?

Of course not. But it is better to try to follow this standard if
possible. And it *is* possible for Russian to use these settings.

> > > Next, when somebody uses Russian language in his TeX document,
> > > very offten the other language(s) used in the same document
> > > will have the codes of it's letters below 128. So,
> > > why not to allow Babel to change lccodes for Russian
> > > in this case?

Well, think of multilingualism. The next one will mix Russian with old
Greek (where the same problems are) in one paragraph. What then?

> If we will have the TeX's internal encoding for _letters_ of some language
> different from the _native_ encoding(s) used in this language
> (i.e. encoding, which is used to typeset the documents in text editors,
> and which is built into screen fonts, etc.), then we will have to
> perform a translation from the language-native encoding into TeX's internal
> encoding. This can be done in different ways:
> 1) do this transliteration `on the fly' by means of external tools
>    before sending text to TeX (and also before examiming TeX's logs).
>    This approach is not ideal, but it can be used.

bad.

> 2) use TeX Code Pages (TCP). This has advantage because it is universal,
>    and lets us preserve catcodes of translated characters.
>    But TCP are not supported by all TeX implementations.

only emTeX, AFAIK. Non-portable.

> 3) declare all _letters_ of this language to be non-letters (!)
>    from the TeX's point of view -- i.e. declare them active characters.
>    But this approach has some disadvattages:

only for the input encoding!

>    * letters are now `not letters' -- so it becomes impossible
>      to define and use macroses with names consisting of letters of this language.

this is bad anyway, since TeX does not have a mechanism for separating
control characters from normal TeX (Omega can do this...)

>    * TeX log files become unreadable (because our fonts have encoding different
>      from TeX's internal encoding). So it becobes very tricky to work with TeX.
>      This, again, can be avoided by translating TeX log files `manually',
>      but this approach is not applicable to all users...

Have you ever seen a log file of my CJK package for Chinese? :-)

> BTW, how one can make virtex (I use NTeX under Linux) or teTeX to
> show characters with codes above 0x80 as normal characters?
> In the case of emtex, it is possible to use options like `-o' and `-8'.
> But I didn't find the way to do this with virtex.

send a change file to Karl Berry, the author of web2c. It's not
implemented.

> > this third language must of course also follow the default \lccode and
> > \uccode values in the ASCII range. As long you don't have more than 256
> > characters in your alphabet (including punctuation marks) this IS
> > POSSIBLE!
>
> I did not catch what you meant. Do you mean that all cyrillic characters
> will not fit into T2 table, so there will be two tables?

not really, since you can't have correct hyphenation between two distinct
fonts. I just have meant that (theretically) you will find for most
character based languages (which need hyphenation) a solution (probably
with a new font encoding) using the default lccodes and uccodes (together
with macros in \@uclclist).

> > I want to change my own code to T2.
>
> BTW, do you have the new alpha version of LH fonts (with T2 encoding)?

Oh! This is good news! Where can I get them?


    Werner

ATOM RSS1 RSS2