Bug#195808: plain tex, ngerman.sty, and German hyphenation.
Dear Andreas,
last summer you reported this bug, and it hasn't been resolved since
then. I guess you also haven't found a solution yet?
Dr. Andreas Krüger <andreas.krueger@dv-ratio.com> schrieb:
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 09:20:55AM +0200, Hilmar Preusse wrote:
>
>> As far I as I understand you, that problem is, that there are no
>> german hyphenations, if you use (n)german.sty and not the advantage
>> of (n)german if you use that ngermanb.sty.
>
> Exactly.
>
>> > There is a text "gerdoc.tex" (gerdoc.dvi)...
>
>> So, could you exactly describe, what you did?
>
> Sorry, no. I tried a few things, but not in a systematic fashion.
>
>
>> Did you change language.dat in /etc/texmf, commented out
>> the hyphenation pattern for german and rebuilt the
>> format-files?
>
> No, that was not neccessary.
[...]
I don't know much about plain TeX, either. But from what I understood
from gerdoc.dvi pp. 13ff, it seems that hyphenation and "u shortcuts
require different steps. For the umlaut shortcuts, one needs
(n)german.sty. These styles also try to load german hyphenation
patterns, but installing these is a different thing.
And what I take out from gerdoc.dvi is that plain TeX doesn't use
language.dat, but instead hyphen.tex. This is USenglish in the first
place, and one has to rename it and create a new one that loads both the
renamed ushyphen.tex, and the german patterns. After that, the format
has to be regenerated.
An alternative seems to be to change /etc/texmf/fmt.d/00tetex.cnf to
enable babel for plain TeX (it's explained in the file). Or you use etex
and language.def
Does that help you? Note that currently
/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen/hyphen.tex is _not_ regarded as a
configuration file and will be overwritten if tetex-base is upgraded. We
should probably change this...
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie
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