Bug#296885: tetex-bin: russian hypenation doesn't work with \usepackage[russian, english]{babel}
Alexander Kogan <alexander@kogan.nnov.ru> wrote:
>> You should just put the language you use first at the end of the list,
>> and use \selectlanguage{english} and \selectlanguage{russian} to
>> switch. Or you use the alternatives described in the following
>> paragraphs, the otherlanguage environment, or the \foreignlanguage
>> macro.
>>
>> If that works for you, please close this bug - just send your answer to
>> 296885-done@bugs.debian.org.
>
> It works, but is not convenient for me, because I write text which will be
> translated from russian to english later and now it is a mix of russian and
> enlish words ;-)). Could you show me the "authomatic" way to use english and
> russian hyphenation together, like OpenOffice does? Or it is not possible?
I fear their is no automatic way. How does OpenOffice discriminate
whether a word is meant to be english or russian? Does it decide that
every word that contains cyrillic letters is russian, and every that
does not contain any cyrillic letter is english?
I guess when babel was developed, nobody thought about that possibility,
because people were mainly thinking about mixing different languages
that all use latin letters. And there's no way to automatically
determine whether "fast" is meant to be englisch or german (where it
means "nearly"). Of course, if you mix different scripts it becomes
possible (but you can't discriminate between different languages that
use cyrillic, too).
In summary: There is currently no way to do this using babel. It might
be generally feasible using low-level TeX programming, i.e. putting
hooks into inputenc.sty. But even that might not work, because AFAIK
the information from input encoding is lost (everything is transformed
to TeX-internal encoding) long before TeX decides where the word borders
are (e.g. Cyr\TeX is going to be one word, but it consists of four
tokens, one of which is a macro).
And I must admit that we, the Debian teTeX maintainers, are the wrong
people to ask for this. Perhaps somebody on comp.text.tex can help
you. But is it really necessary to have nice hyphenation in a text that
is only work in progress?
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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