Re: french hyphenation patterns

[Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@msu.edu>]

Jitse Niesen <jn221@damtp.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> On 5 Feb 2001, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> 
> > I'm currently trying to figure out how to typeset French properly with
> > LaTeX under Debian.  Most everything seems to work properly [...]
> > However, hyphenation doesn't come out correctly.  I get the following
> > output from TeX:
> > [...]
> >     Package babel Warning: No hyphenation patterns were loaded for
> >     (babel)                the language `French'
> >     (babel)                I will use the patterns loaded for \language=0 instead.
> > [...]
> 
> You need to build a new so-called format file which includes the
> hyphenation patterns for French. To do so, run the program 'texconfig' (as
> root), choose the option hyphen and uncomment the line about French, ie.
> remove the percent sign in front of the lines:
> 
> french     frhyphen
> =patois
> 
> All should fine afterwards. Please feel free to ask if the above is not
> clear or does not work.

Thanks for the suggestion.  When I go to do this, I find that
there are similar lines already in the file:

    % French, TWO lines!
    french          frhyph.tex
    =patois

So I modified the whitespace in the file a little to force
texconfig to rebuild the formats.  It then did rebuild
them. However, even then hyphenation doesn't work properly--I
still get the same error message as above.

Just to see if it would make a difference, I downgraded the tetex
packages to the latest stable versions (I normally run
bleeding-edge unstable) but nothing changed.

Any further suggestions?

-- 
"There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you.
 And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you.
 I told them you were the best.  Now you damn well better be."
--Orson Scott Card, _Ender's Game_