Re: hyphenation in non-English languages

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > Do you want to?
>
> Will have a look, but I can't promise anything due to time
> constraints.

To get some basic non-English hyphenation support, almost nothing has
to be changed if you use the current TeXLive.  Here I demonstrate what
to do for German.

  . The basic trick is to process the texinfo file with `eplain'
    instead of `tex'.  With TeXLive, this gives access to all
    configured hyphenation patterns.  `bplain' would do the same, but
    there is (currently) no soft link to the `tex' binary.

  . In txi-de.tex, add the following lines at the very beginning:

      \makeatletter
      \global\lefthyphenmin 2
      \global\righthyphenmin 2
      address@hidden
      \makeatother

That's it.  Add, for example, the following at the beginning of your
texinfo file:

  @documentlanguage de
  @documentencoding UTF-8

Other languages can be handled similarly.  You can use any input
encoding -- since texinfo has hardcoded support for CM fonts only,
words with accented letters aren't hyphenated anyway.

A minor problem is that there is no `pdfeplain' command in TeXLive
yet, but this is very easy to fix.

How shall we proceed?


    Werner