braams@pttrnl.nl (Johannes L. Braams) (01/18/91)
In article <3857@cernvax.cern.ch>, goossens@cernvax.cern.ch (michel goossens) writes: > Here at CERN, which is a European Laboratory with two official languages > (French and English), but with over ten languages being used in text > processing ... > ... very often I get requests for 'non-american-english' versions of > (La)TeX. As we do not have the necessary staff for supporting all kinds of > packages on all computer platforms over here, we decided to 'actively' > support only LaTeX and printing on PostScript printers. > Therefore my two questions: > - We are using TeX 3. (upwards, approaching \pi) and would like to use the > \language command for the hyphenation dictionnaries. Does someone already > have a scheme with new TeX worked out, so that we can follow that one, > or do I use something similar to what already exists for TeX 2. As has been mentioned in the last issue on TUGboat, I'm working on just what you want. The work started out in a TeX 2.x environment, but I'm now also including TeX 3.x features. The system I'm working on is called `babel'. It supports multiple languages, provides a mechanism to switch between them. It is written in such a way that it can be used by both plain TeX *and* LaTeX users. In the current version I also supply a mechanism whereby some LaTeX definitions from the various `standard' style files are overridden with `parameterized' versions. This is accompished using a naming convention for the macros that replace the texts like the one adopted in german.sty. A pre-release of the system is available from LISTSERV@HEARN, look in the TeX-NL FILELIST. This version does not yet support TeX 3.0, I'm still working on that. I hope to publish an article in the first regular issue of TUGboat (#2 that is) this year. -- Johannes Braams PTT Research Neher Laboratorium, P.O. box 421, 2260 AK Leidschendam, The Netherlands. Phone : +31 70 3325051 E-mail : JL_Braams@pttrnl.nl -------------------------------------------------------------------------------