Re: l10n problems in JadeTeX and Jade/OpenJade TeX backend

Subject: Re: l10n problems in JadeTeX and Jade/OpenJade TeX backend
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 16:20:59 +0100 (BST)

| The best fix is to have Jade output the correct \usepackage line for
| babel to the intermediate jadetex file.  I'd guess it needs to
| gather the list of all lang attributes used in the sgml file and
| output \usepackage[the-list]{babel} at the start of things.  NOTE:
| this will make the new patched Jade's output incompatible with
| current jadetex (which must *not* require babel).


Babel brings three kind os feature to latex:
1) an interface to hyphenation tables for different languages
2) Fixed text strings in different languages for `Figure' etc
3) Shorthand keyboard entry for common constructions in a given
   language. 


For jadetex, 3 is no use at all, and most of 2 is unused as well, as
far more of the strings are being generated at the dsssl level.
1 would be useful except for an unfortunate limitation of tex-the-program
that the hyphenation patterns have to be loaded when the jadetex format
is made, you can not load a new hyphenation pattern based on the
languages used in a document.

So on balance I can't really see that checking the file for the
languages used and adding babel declarations will help very much.
You just need to be able to switch to the language at the appropriate
time and hope that the hyphenation table for that language has been
loaded.

David


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