[tex-live] Czech support, ugly but efficient solution

[Petr Olsak]

On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:

> I don't see that's babel problem. We need generic and complete
> hyphenation patterns library also for ConTeXt, Omega, etc., as well
> for latex users. Moreover babel package *does not* contain hyphenation
> stuff. On CTAN it is language/hyphenation/ and it seems that Johannes
> is not responsible for that.

OK. Who is responsible to "generic hyphen patterns library"?

> I'm still trying to consider all that problem in the context of all
> distributions, like teTeX, TeX Live, fpTeX, MiKTeX (also Linux
> distibutions with TeX stuff). Some of them have installation program
> and allow selecting packages. So I can imagine somebody wanting latex
> with, e.g., spain and czech + T1 ec (or cm-super) fonts.
> To conclude:
> texmf/generic/hyphen/[cz|sk]hyph.tex (independent and complete files)
>  would work with latex+babel and other
> texmf/csplain/[cz|sk]hyphen.tex
>  would work with untouched CSTeX (csplain, cslatex).

I did mean that the dependency is not problem. If somebody choose the
Czech language in Babel without the CSTeX package (the official
Czech+Slovak support), then he cannot be wonder that the Czech language
does not work. We have dependencies in CSTeX sub-packages too:
CSplain depends on CSfonts + CM fonts + plain + TeX core.
CSlatex depends on CSplain + latex.

But you have right and I accept your arguments.

The disadvantage of your suggestion is that if we improve the Slovak
hyphen patterns in CSTeX, the change will be not applied in the "generic
hyphen patterns library" automatically. I remember the similar
situation: we have improved the Czech hyphen patterns in 1995 but
this improved version was released only in 1999 in "generic hyphen
patterns library".

The maintainer of the "generic hyphen patterns library" can take the
czhyphen.tex, skhyphen.tex, rename it and do anything with these files.
For example he can re-encode them to 8bit convention.
You can see from comments that the software in these files is GPL like.
If the maintainer of the "generic hyphen patterns library" does not accept
my one-line solution which makes the cz|sh patterns depend to csplain, he
can do another solution. He can take some macros from my t1code.tex too.

Who do it?

Petr Olsak