Bug#195808: plain tex, ngerman.sty, and German hyphenation.
> Sorry but I have no knowledge on the German hyphenation
> pattern, but is this the same as #62271 (which seemed
> to be filed by you?)
It is the same person filing the bug, but not the same bug.
The old bug concerned an inconsistency between pdfetex and pdftex: One
worked, the other one didn't.
Now the two are consistent, but unfortunately, they both do no longer work.
> Is it not a real solution? If not what is the real solution?
I do not know what the real solution is.
> > (Workaround: Use \input ngermanb.sty .)
> Is this workaround not acceptable?
Not to me.
Here is some background:
I am a person that learned how to use (plain) TeX a _long_ time ago. Some
15 years now. (There are not a whole lot of computer programs that you
could have learned how to use 15 years ago and still benefit today.)
Some time later, but not a whole lot later, I learned this system how to
type German texts in plain TeX using \input german.sty, lately replaced by
\input ngerman.sty when our orthography changed somewhat.
When you want to type an German special character "Umlaut" in TeX, such as
the "ü" in my name, you type an " and then the letter u without the Umlaut:
``Krüger'' is typed ``Kr"uger''.
Plain TeX without ngerman.sty allows you to also type this letter, but you
do \"u, i.e., ``Krüger'' is typed ``Kr\"uger''.
Germans noticed that Knuth didn't quite get those Umlauts right. To our
taste, the dots above the u are just a bit too far up, to remote from the
letter itself. So this was fixed in ngerman.sty. Also, some other helpful
things were added.
I more or less accidently found ngermanb.sty. This makes the hyphenation
work and saved my day yesterday. But the "u does not work, I again have to
use the original \"u. And the dots do come out a bit high, I think.
I don't think this is a very important bug. This whole ngerman.sty is
itself quite old. Not a whole lot of people seem to use plain TeX these
days, as I do. It seems people have moved on to LaTeX. I have no idea how
many remaining plain TeX users writing German texts use ngerman.sty any
more. There may or may not be better alternatives now, (besides moving on
to LaTeX).
So this may all be a backward compatibility issue. As I have said, I am
now only a rather occasional TeX user. I simply continue to use what I
have learned years ago, and continue to be happy with it.
That said, I would indeed like to have my "real" ngerman.sty back,
functioning fully. Even outside of my own hard disk, there probably are
some more documents floating around that have been written using either
ngerman.sty or german.sty. It would be nice to still be able to typeset
those, even with a modern TeX.
So, in my opinion, this is a bug indeed.
Just using ngermanb seems to be a workaround, but is not a real fix of the
underlying bug. I'm missing features from ngerman.sty.
What, then, is the real fix?
There is a text "gerdoc.tex" (gerdoc.dvi), that describes the configuration
steps that used to fix the bug some five years ago. Unfortunately, that
text is in German.
I have briefly tried to dig my way through that text, but gathered the
impression that the steps described do no longer fix the bug - the TeX
configuration setup seems to have changed.
I hope that someone who knows German, and has a better knowledge on how a
current teTeX installation setup works, comes along and finds the right fix
for this bug.
Regards,
Andreas
--
Dr. Andreas Krüger
andreas.krueger@dv-ratio.com
DV-RATIO Nordwest GmbH
Tel.: +49 211 577 996-0
Fax: +49 211 559 1617
Leostraße 31
40545 Düsseldorf
Germany
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