******************************************************************************* * * * TTTTTTT X X M M GGGGGG A Mostly Unofficial * * T X X MM MM G Publication for Users * * T EEEEEEE XXX M M M M A G GG Of the TeX Computer * * T E X X M M M A A G G Typesetting System. * * T EEEE X X M M M AAAAA GGGGGG * * E A A Volume 2, Number 5 * * EEEEEEE A A Distribution: 1102 or so... * * * ******************************************************************************* August 4, 1988 \footnote............................................................1 Letters to the editor................................................2 News Son of new versions of TeX and Metafont.............................3 Program for 1988 TeX Users Group Meeting............................4 Contents of TUGboat 9#2.............................................5 Special Issue: Non-English TeX My experience with German TeX.......................................6 How to make the LaTeX document style files usable with non-English languages..............7 Icelandic TeX.......................................................8 Using TeX for typesetting Irish text................................9 Non-English hyphenation and TeX....................................10 __1 \footnote{Obnoxious Americans} TeX was clearly designed for an American audience; from its avoidance of hyphenation of accented words, to its handling of quotation marks it shows its American bias thoroughly. But despite TeX's American intentions, it has been seized upon by the international academic community (and to a lesser extent commercial and governmental computer people as well) as the typesetting system of choice because of the ease with which it handles such tasks as accenting of letters (a non- trivial endeavor under many document formatting systems) and handling of ligatures. TeX's handling of ligatures makes it ideal for certain jobs; for example, the AMS Cyrillic font uses ligatures to allow users to type Shch to get a capital sh-chah. The result is that while the Cyrillic text is input on a roman keyboard, it still retains a high degree of readability. Silvio Levy chose to use TeX's ligaturing capabilities to produce the accents in his Greek font. This approach has several advantages: first, by using ligatures rather than TeX's \accent primitive, hyphenation of accented words became possible (in a heavily accented language like ancient Greek, this is a necessity); second, the use of ligatures allowed multiple accents on a single letter, something that cannot be done with \accent. A similar approach was taken by Pierre MacKay in his design of an input format for Turkish TeX. These solutions work fine for Roman keyboards, but the field of foreign keyboards still remains largely undeveloped. Most character sets containing accented characters use codes greater than 127 which TeX cannot process. For these character sets, pre-processors or some similar mechanism are necessary to get the file into a format readable by TeX. Oriental languages, particularly Chinese and Japanese present another problem simply due to the large number of Kanji (roughly 6000). jTeX provides an input mechanism for those whose keyboards allow Kanji input (I'd like to see a Kanji keyboard someday), but if only romanized input is possible, we are left with a very difficult problem. This issue contains some notes on various individual's work on the problem of using TeX with a language other than English. Many topics are not covered: for example, much work is being done at the University of Washington with oriental language processing. The work done with Turkish typesetting is available now to those who have internet access. [[To obtain the files, logon through anonymous FTP to june.cs.washington.edu and retrieve the file turkish.tar from the directory pub.]] In addition, Dominik Wujastyk who submitted the article "Indic and other fonts for TeX" in V2N2 has since revised and expanded the article to cover the whole spectrum of fonts available for TeX. In it is much information on non-English TeX from the font perspective. G'day -dh P.S. The next issue of TeXMaG will be out sometime early in September. At least, that's what I claim. __2 ********************************************************************** * Letters to the editor * ********************************************************************** Date: Tue, 7 Jun 88 14:03 N From: It is obvious to any user of TeX or LaTeX who writes prose in a language other than English that he or she has to do the hyphenation by hand. Donald Knuth describes an algorithm that can give the hyphenation for a lot of words. Now we could use that algorithm to make a pattern-file for any language we would care to use (Dutch in our case), but this is a lot of work (too much for us), and it might be the case that someone else has done it already! I have a suggestion that could propably save a lot of people this work. If there are people who have made a pattern-file for a non-English language they could "donate" this file to the TeX-user community by making it public. And what better way to do this than by using the capabilities of electronic magazines! I propose to start a "magazine" that publishes these pattern-files, by distributing to subscribers a list of available pattern-files, and making these files accessible from the LISTSERVER by using database commands. Now there only remains the question of where this magazine should reside and who should edit it... Dick van Soest University of Twente Enschede, The Netherlands Department of Computer Science Tel. 053-893915 Knowledge Based Systems Group E-mail: VANSOEST@HENUT5.bitnet __3 ********************************************************************** * Son of new versions of TeX and Metafont * ********************************************************************** Thanks to the sharp eye of Chris Thompson, TeX and Metafont have both gained a higher version number. The bug only affects those installations where mem_min has been set negative (which excludes the vast majority of sites who have mem_min=0). In addition to fixing the bug, a small optimization has been made to TeX's actions when it is running out of memory. Differences between TeX 2.92 and 2.93 and MF 1.4 and 1.5 follow: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Differences between TeX.WEB for 2.92 and for 2.93 **** FILE TX:TEX-2-92.WEB.1, 1-31 (2023) % A reward of $81.92 will be paid to the first finder of any remaining bug. **** FILE TX:TEX-2-93.WEB.1, 1-30 (2021) % Version 2.93 fixes negative halving in allocator when mem_min<0 (June 1988). % A reward of $81.92 will be paid to the first finder of any remaining bug. *************** **** FILE TX:TEX-2-92.WEB.1, 2-93 (9207) @d banner=='This is TeX, Version 2.92' {printed when \TeX\ starts} @ Different \PASCAL s have slightly different conventions, and the present **** FILE TX:TEX-2-93.WEB.1, 2-93 (9287) @d banner=='This is TeX, Version 2.93' {printed when \TeX\ starts} @ Different \PASCAL s have slightly different conventions, and the present *************** **** FILE TX:TEX-2-92.WEB.1, 10-221 (115748) begin if lo_mem_max+1000TEX-2-93.WEB.1, 10-221 (115828) begin if hi_mem_min-lo_mem_max>=1998 then t:=lo_mem_max+1000 else t:=lo_mem_max+1+(hi_mem_min-lo_mem_max)div 2; {|lo_mem_max+2<=tMF-1-4.WEB.1, 1-16 (937) % A few "harmless" optimizations have been made since then. % A reward of $20.48 will be paid to the first finder of any remaining bug. **** FILE TX:MF-1-5.WEB.1, 1-16 (937) % Version 1.5 fixes negative halving in allocator when mem_min<0 (June 1988). % A few "harmless" optimizations have been made without changing versions. % A reward of $20.48 will be paid to the first finder of any remaining bug. *************** **** FILE TX:MF-1-4.WEB.1, 2-81 (7574) @d banner=='This is METAFONT, Version 1.4' {printed when \MF\ starts} @ Different \PASCAL s have slightly different conventions, and the present **** FILE TX:MF-1-5.WEB.1, 2-81 (7668) @d banner=='This is METAFONT, Version 1.5' {printed when \MF\ starts} @ Different \PASCAL s have slightly different conventions, and the present *************** **** FILE TX:MF-1-4.WEB.1, 11-190 (138945) begin if lo_mem_max+1000mem_min+max_halfword then t:=mem_min+max_halfword; **** FILE TX:MF-1-5.WEB.1, 11-190 (139039) begin if hi_mem_min-lo_mem_max>=1998 then t:=lo_mem_max+1000 else t:=lo_mem_max+1+(hi_mem_min-lo_mem_max)div 2; {|lo_mem_max+2<=tmem_min+max_halfword then t:=mem_min+max_halfword; *************** __4 ********************************************************************** * Program for 1988 TeX Users Group Meeting * ********************************************************************** By Dean Guenther Here is this year's annual TUG meeting program, which will be held in Montr\`eal. This year's program is the biggest ever. Hope to see you there. -- Dean Guenther ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TeX USERS GROUP McGill University, Montr\'eal August 21--24, 1988 Updated Program as of June 17, 1988 Sunday -- August 21 7:30--10:15pm Dinner/Cocktails -- Le Festin du Gouverneur Monday -- August 22 7:45--9:00 Registration 8:00--9:00 Introduction to TeX and TUG -- Bart Childs 9:00--9:15 Introductions: officers, site coordinators, etc. TeX in Production: In-House Systems 9:15-9:45 Producing NASA Technical Reports with a TeX-based typesetting system -- Mary McCaskil 9:45-10:15 TeX in an integrated system development environment -- Tom Renfrow 10:15-10:30 break 10:30-11:00 Using TeX to control departmental documentation --David Ness and James Slagle 11:00-11:30 Producing families of manuals from the same sources -- Laurie Mann 11:30-1:00 lunch 1:00-1:30 Using TeX to produce government standard documentation -- Jean Pollari TeX in Production: Case Studies 1:30-2:00 Implementing TeX in a production environment -- Eric Jul 2:00-2:30 An experience in textbook production -- James Mooney 2:30-3:00 Using TeX to produce kennel club year books -- Robert Harris 3:00-3:15 break TeX in Production: TeXnical Solutions 3:15-3:45 A page layout design to facilitate production -- Elizabeth Barnhart and David Ness 3:45-4:15 How and why a trade typesetter chose TeX -- Alex Warman Orientation 4:15-4:45 Things to do in and around Montr\'eal 4:45-5:30 TUG's educational activities: courses, outlines, syllabi, milestones, and future -- Bart Childs 5:30-??? Wine & Cheese -- hosted by Personal TeX 5:30-??? Birds-of-a-Feather sessions for sites (DG, CMS, MVS, CDC, UNIX, VMS, etc.; during and after the Wine & Cheese) Tuesday -- August 23 8:30-10:30 Output device manufacturer/exhibitor presentations (Tentative listing based on 1987 participation) Varityper Corp.; H. St\"urtz AG; TeXT1; TeXnology, Inc.; Talaris Systems Inc.; Personal TeX; K-Talk Communications; Northlake Software; Blue Sky Software; Imagen Corp.; ftl systems Inc.; Docusoft Publishing Technologies; Arbor Text, Inc.; Digital Composition Corp.; Computer Composition Corp.; Autologic, Inc. 10:30-10:45 break 10:45-11:30 Site coordinators' status reports VAX (VMS) -- Barry Smith; UNIX -- Pierre Mackay; Small Systems -- Lance Carnes; Prime -- John Crawford; IBM VM/CMS -- Dean Guenther; IBM MVS -- Craig Platt; Data General -- Bart Childs; CDC Cyber -- Jim Fox 11:30-1:00 lunch TeX Training 1:00-1:30 TeX tips for getting started -- Berkeley Parks 1:30-2:00 The art of teaching TeX for production -- Alan Wittbecker 2:00-2:30 Comercial use of TeX: experiences of a consultant -- Arthur Ogawa 2:30-3:00 Choosing between TeX and LaTeX -- Shawn Farrell 3:00-3:15 break Non-English TeX 3:15-3:45 Mathematics textbook publishing with Japanese TeX -- Nobuo Saito and Kazuhiro Kitagawa 3:45-4:15 SemiTeX: limited support for semitic languages -- Jacques Goldberg 4:15-4:45 TeX is multilingual -- Michael Ferguson 4:45-5:15 Experiences with TeX in Finland -- Kauko Saarinen 5:15-5:45 DVI driver standards update -- Robert McGaffey 5:45-??? Topical Birds-of-a-Feather sessions (LaTeX, graphics, fonts, etc.) Wednesday -- August24 TeX and SGML 8:30-9:00 Using the Emacs editor to safely edit TeX sources and translate SGML into TeX -- Stephan von Bechtolsheim 9:00-9:30 Using SGML and TeX to produce useredocumentation -- Lynne Price TeXnical Support 9:30-10:00 Previewers -- Ken Yap 10:00-11:30 TUG business meeting 11:30-1:00 lunch TeXnical Support 1:00-1:30 Software for technical book production -- Robert Kruse 1:30-2:00 CapTeX: industrial strength TeX -- Mike Schmidt 2:00-2:30 FaSTeX -- Paul Muller 2:30-2:45 break 2:45-3:45 TeX problems help session -- Barbara Beeton et al. 3:45-4:15 Report from the training standards committee 4:15-4:30 General wrap-up and closing -- Bart Childs et al. Program coordinator: Dean Guenther -- Washington State University Committee: Christina Thiele -- Carleton University; Shawn Farrell -- McGill University __5 ********************************************************************** * Contents of TUGboat 9#2 * ********************************************************************** By Barbara Beeton Table of contents for TUGboat 9#2, August 1988 General Delivery 117 Bart Childs From the President 117 Ray Goucher Los Alamos sets new membership record 117 Donald Knuth awarded Franklin Medal 118 Elizabeth Barnhart TeX in the publishing environment: A survey of production/ commercial users 121 Barbara Beeton Editorial comments Software 121 Barbara Beeton New version(s) of TeX and Metafont 122 Bart Childs 64-bit TeX 123 Klaus Lichtenwalder Porting TeX to C 124 David Kennedy TeX adapted to CWEB Fonts 125 Glenn Vanderburg Some useful variations of standard fonts 126 Georgia K.M. Tobin Designing for low-res devices 129 Bart Childs TeX fonts and suggested magnifications 131 Dominik Wujastyk The many faces of TeX: A survey of digital METAfonts 152 Donald E. Knuth A Punk Meta-Font Output Devices 169 Don Hosek TeX output devices (with charts) 178 Shane Dunne Why TeX should NOT output PostScript-- yet: Addendum 178 Warren Wolfe ASCII Preview with vuTeX 151 Index to sample output from various devices Site Reports Cray 181 Bart Childs TeX on the Cray Data General 181 Bart Childs Data General site report Macintosh 181 Barry Smith Macintosh site report Warnings & Limitations 182 Barbara Beeton Controlling CTL-M; Ruling the depths Macros 183 Peter Breitenlohner German TeX, a next step 186 Michael J. Wichura Some problems with the INRSTeX table making macros 189 A. J. Van Haagen Box plots and scatter plots with TeX macros 193 Michael J. Wichura PiCTeX: Macros for drawing PiCtures LaTeX 198 Jackie Damrau The LaTeX user's column 200 Ken Yap Contents of LaTeX style collection as of 19th June 1988 203 Stephan v. Bechtolsheim A note on processing parts with LaTeX 204 Kent McPherson Page layout in LaTeX: Erratum News & Announcements 205 Calendar 206 Bernard Gaulle GUTenberg meeting report Late-Breaking News 207 Knuth Scholarship winner __6 ********************************************************************** * My Experience With German TeX * ********************************************************************** by Dr. Hubert Partl Although TeX and LaTeX have been designed for American standards only, they are being used all over the world and with a lot of different languages. In this article, I want to present my experience with the problems that arise when modifying TeX or LaTeX for easier application with a language other than US-English. Hints are added, how similar work should be performed for other European languages, with special regard to compatibility and portability problems. What We Want: ------------- We want to use TeX and/or LaTeX. We don't live in the United States of America. We want to use our own lanugages and our own typesetting conventions. Therefore, we want to modify TeX and/or LaTeX. But we still want to be able to exchange files with other people. Therefore, our modifications shall not make us incompatible with the rest of the TeX world. What the German TeX Users Group Did: -------------------------------------- o Read my article about "German TeX" in TUGboat Vol.9/No.1 (April 88) for what we did, and how we did it, and why we did it that way! You may also want to look at the file GERMAN.STY, which can be found in the Rochester LaTeX Style File Collection. BITNET users may type TELL NETSERV AT AEARN GET GERMAN STY to get this file from the Austrian COUNTRY FILELIST. --- What You Should Do for Your Language: ------------------------------------- From my experiences with "German TeX", here is what I recommend to all language specific modifications of TeX: Yes, do consider modifying TeX and LaTeX to support your language, but: Keep portability. Before you invent your own modifications, talk to other TeX users in your country and agree on a common set of language specific TeX commands and control sequences (the "standard user interface"). Don't re-invent the wheel. Collect all the ideas other people in your country and in other countries have already found useful. As soon as you have agreed on the user interface, better provide a "quick and dirty" realisation first, rather than nothing at all, so that users can start to use the new TeX commands. Then, later, you can go for better and optimised solutions. Provide format files with hyphenation patterns for your language--in addition to the original ones, or provide M.Ferguson's multi-lingual TeX software with hyphenation patterns for English and for your language. If national keyboards are in use, provide a conversion routine that replaces the national characters by the corresponding TeX control sequences. Provide easy-to-use control sequences for everything that occurs very frequently in your language. Provide additional commands or control sequences for everything that is needed to typeset texts in your language. Change the texts appearing in the LaTeX captions, headings, dates, etc., by using the same method and the same modified document style files as we did (see my TUGboat article and the file GERMAN.STY for the details). Provide commands to switch between your modifications and the original versions of TeX and LaTeX, in the same way as we did (see TUGboat again). Encourage every institution to modify the layout conventions to their own local needs, but don't make these conventions a "uniform" standard. Take care that your modifications work both with Plain TeX and with the macro packages LaTeX, \AMSTeX, WEBMAC, and perhaps others that are in use in your country. Make your modifications available for all computer types (mainframes and Personal Computers) and for all output devices. (If its just TeX macros, that's no problem. If you change the TeX software or the Computer Modern fonts, it's going to be a big problem. Therefore, better don't!) And: Tell other people about what you are planning and what you have done, via TeXhax and TeXMag and TUGboat, and within your national TeX Users Group. __7 ********************************************************************** * How to make the LaTeX document style files * * usable with non-English languages * ********************************************************************** By For application outside the United States of America, the LaTeX document style files should be modified in two respects: 1. The hard coded English words in the caption texts, today's date, etc., have to be changed to your language. 2. The typesetting, layout, and enumeration conventions have to be changed to the conventions of your country. The following hints deal with the first item only. Each installation should take care of the second item locally. I suggest to use the method adopted by the German TeX Users Group. This means, that the original document style files shall be modified in the following way: The hard coded English words (like "Contents") have to be replaced by corresponding command names (e.g. \contentsname), and these command names have to be defined to contain the original words, e.g. with \def\contentsname{Contents}. Then, in the language specific document style option file, you can re-define the command names to contain the texts in your language (e.g. \def\contentsname{Inhalt} for German texts). Leslie Lamport's comments in the DOC-Files provide help in finding all places where such modifications are necessary. Several people in different places have recently started such modifications, but they all have used different command names, which will inevitably lead to incompatibility and chaos. Therefore, I strongly suggest that *all* LaTeX modifiers use the same set of modified document style files and that these files are made available to all LaTeX users in a central place such as the Rochester LaTeX style collection. For two reasons, I suggest to agree on those command names that are listed in the table below. They have been introduced by Wolfgang Appelt at the GMD in Bonn several years ago. 1. These names have already been used in a large number of installations throughout Germany and other countries for several years, so they can be viewed as something like a de-facto standard. 2. The names do not contain at-signs. Users can change caption texts to their needs by placing commands like \renewcommand{\contentsname}{My Own New Text} into the preamble. These modifications may be of interest even in the English speaking countries, e.g. if someone prefers "Table of Contents" to just "Contents". -------------------------------------------------------------- command name original text German text -------------------------------------------------------------- \contentsname Contents Inhaltsverzeichnis \listfigurename List of Figures Abbildungsverzeichnis \listtablename List of Tables Tabellenverzeichnis \abstractname Abstract Zusammenfassung \refname References Literatur \bibname Bibliography Literaturverzeichnis \indexname Index Index \figurename Figure Abbildung \tablename Table Tabelle \partname Part Teil \chaptername Chapter Kapitel \appendixname Appendix Anhang --------------------------------------------------------------- Bitnet users can obtain the modified document style files from NETSERV at the Austrian node AEARN. With TELL NETSERV AT AEARN GET TEX INDEX you get a list of the TEX files available there. With TELL NETSERV AT AEARN GET xxxxxxxx STY you get the file xxxxxxxx.STY. The files can also be found in the TEXTOOLS FILELIST of LISTSERV AT DHDURZ1. The language specific versions of today's date can be obtained just by re-definitions of the \today command in analogy to the original definition by Leslie Lamport. Examples can be found in the german document style option file which you can get via Bitnet with TELL NETSERV AT AEARN GET GERMAN STY (Non-IBM sites cannot use the TELL command. Instead, they shall send to NETSERV@AEARN a one-line-message that contains the GET command - in the body of the mail, not in the subject line.) __8 ********************************************************************** * Icelandic TeX * ********************************************************************** By Jorgen Pind I have been working sporadically on an Icelandic version of TeX for some time now. My first version was created last year but was not terribly good, a preliminary better version is now available. What has to be done to make TeX work for Icelandic? There are a number of things, namely the following: 1. Fonts. The Icelandic alphabet has a total of 72 (upper and lower case) characters. This includes the standard English alphabet plus the following: A. 10 acutely accented characters, viz. a, e, dotless i, o, u and y as well as uppercase versions of these. B. Umlauted o (and O). C. The ligatures \ae and \AE. D. The letters thorn and eth (again, lower and uppercase). Please note that d-stroke is completely unacceptable in Icelandic. It is possible to get all of these characters except thorn and eth by using the standard computer modern fonts. However TeX is not able to hyphenate words containing accents so if one wants to use hyphenation it is necessary to make accented characters available to TeX as single glyphs. (Another solution would of course be to use Multi-lingual TeX but that would not provide eth and thorn so it becomes necessary to make special fonts for Icelandic anyway.) Since device drivers were until quite recently not able to handle 256 character fonts I have been forced to make do with 128 character fonts for the time being. This will be changed in a future release. I have made place for all the special lower case Icelandic characters in the im* (Icelandic modern) fonts as well as uppercase Eth and Thorn. The fonts contain \ae and \AE as well since these are part of the cm-fonts. The uppercase versions of the acutely accented letters and umlauted O are however made in the traditional TeXian manner. Additionally I have changed the double quote signs. Icelandic uses a lower quote on the left side and an upper one on the right side. Another charecter which will probably be changed in the future version is the em-dash. The cm-version is never seen in Icelandic where the em-dash is usually about 3/4 of an em. To make place for a total of 11 Icelandic characters aacute, eacute, iacute, oacute, uacute, yacute, oumlaut, thorn, eth, Thorn and Eth the following have been dropped from the standard cm-table: A. F-ligatures, 5 in all. Ligatures have been used sporadically in Icelandic printing, however a recent trend seems to favour, alas, no ligatures. The reason is simply technical. Something has to be dropped from phototypesetters to allow them to deal with the Icelandic alphabet. B. Spanish exclamation and question marks (2). C. Polish l, scharfes s, the french \oe and \OE (4). My future version, using >128 character fonts, will reinstate these characters along with the uppercase letters now missing from the fonts. I will probably also add an O with the ogonek to enable typesetting of Old Icelandic texts in the normalized alphabet. I have also considered the possibility of an fj-ligature but have been unable to make up my mind on that score! I have made up Icelandic versions of all fonts except cminch and cmcsc (and the math symbol fonts have of course been left untouched). The kerning table for the italic fonts, though, does not take the Icelandic characters into account. I should add that I have used J. Bradfield's METAFONT code for the eth with slight changes. 2. Accessing the Icelandic characters. The special Icelandic characters have been put into font postions with ASCII-code < 32. Universally, however, computers in Iceland are now using an eight bit character set where the lower 7 bits follow standard ASCII (if one is using an ASCII machine) and the eighth bit either has an idiosyncratic encoding (mostly on IBM PCs), uses the new ISO 8859 standard or IBM's new Code Page 850 (on PS/2's, and the RT). The Icelandic characters are accessed as ligatures following Knuth's recommendation (TeXbook, page 46). The characters are coded as follows: 'a aacute 'e eacute 'i iacute 'o oacute 'u uacute 'y yacute ''o oumlaut 'd eth 't thorn 'T Thorn 'D Eth 'x ae ligature Mostly this appears reasonable except for the 'x which was used simply to get a pattern which would not be confused with anything else. The Icelandic user does not use these ligatures when typesetting with TeX since a small filter translates from the eight bit character set to these encodings. Using ' to mark the ligatures causes some problems since it is also used to typeset the quote marks. Thus it is ncessary to write ''{}o... to inhibit the o umlaut ligature if the first word of the quote starts with an o. (The double quote marks are written ''so`` in the TeX-input file for processing with the Icelandic fonts). 3. Hyphenation. A table of hyphenation patterns has been made using PATGEN. It contains a total of 4197 patterns. This table is based upon a dictionary which my institute made for IBM in Iceland for use as a spelling checker with their office products. The dictionary contains more than 220.000 fully hyphenated words. IBM in Iceland graciously allowed me to use this in making up the Icelandic hyphenation table. The hyphenation table gives excellent results, but does suffer a bit from the fact that it was made in the eight bit world and then simply translated to the ligature coding illustrated above. I seem to recall Knuth stating somewhere that TeX's hyphenation mechanism is not fooled by ligatures. Unfortunately this is a disadvantage in this context since these character encodings are *not* really ligatures. TeX does sometimes split the ligature apart. For some reason this was especially common for the lower-case thorn. I have added a few patterns and some hyphenation exceptions to IPLAIN (the Icelandic PLAIN) to inhibit this, which takes care of most cases. 4. Changes to PLAIN and LaTeX. These have been kept to a minimum and only concern the fonts and hyphenation. The character ' has been redefined as a letter in both cases. I have not yet made a systematic attempt to change LaTeX's headings etc. but have only done so when the need has arisen. The Icelandic version of TeX works quite nicely. My major complaint is that getting verbatim texts is messy since not all characters are accessed as ligatures. This will change in the ``definitive'' version which I hope to have available by the end of the year. J\"orgen Pind Institute of Lexicography University of Iceland Reykjav\'\i k 101 Iceland. Internet adress: jorgen@lexis.hi.is uucp: ...mcvax!hafro!krafla!lexis!jorgen __9 ********************************************************************** * Using TeX for typesetting Irish text * ********************************************************************** By Peter Flynn The ancient Irish alphabet consisted of about 18 characters only (modern usage of course involves the remaining letters of the standard 26-character Roman alphabet to represent foreign words correctly): a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u The lowercase "i" has no dot in traditional usage. When the use of roman typefaces became common from the 1940s onwards, (replacing the script typefaces of older typesetting) the dot appeared because dotless "i" was not normally available (although some printers manually removed the dot from the types in the case with a file!). In recent years the dotless "i" has regained popularity, even being used on the new road signs. The five vowels can take a single diacritical mark, the _fada_ ("long"), made like a French acute accent (\'). This lengthens the vowel sound. The mark can exist on both uppercase and lowercase characters. An older, and now obsolete, diacritical, the _s\'e\i\.m\i\'u_ ("thin": pronounced shay-voo), is a centered dot over an aspirated consonant, representing the absence of the aspirant "h" (s\'e\i mh\i\'u\/} would be the modern spelling). This can occur on b c d f g m p s and t only. This mark would normally only occur in modern printing where older texts are being quoted verbatim. The other change to pronunciation, eclipsis, involves no diacritical marks, but merely the preceding of a consonant by another which eclipses it: the plural of punt ("pound": pronounced poont) becomes bpuint (pronounced bwint) There is an unusual symbol for the ampersand, the _ocus_ ("and") sign, again obsolescent, but regaining popularity. It is canonically shaped about half-way between the musical rest of quaver (eighth-note) duration and a small digit "7". Hyphenation in Irish text setting is extremely problematic: many words do not hyphenate easily, as Irish is not a syllabic language. Even compounds can change spelling substantially when they are formed, following rules about the agreement in quality of the vowels surrounding a consonant. This often makes hyphenation impossible without making reading difficult. The author has no knowledge of any Irish hyphenation dictionary. There is no problem in getting TeX to reproduce very acceptable Irish text, including a substitute "ocus" ampersand by raising by 0.1em a digit 7 in scriptscriptstyle size, thus: \def\&{\raise.1em\hbox{$\scriptscriptstyle7$}} The difficulty occurs for the user in very frequent use of the backslash for diacriticals and the dotless "i", when used, particularly as the alphabetic command sequence \i requires a following space within a word and a control-space at the end of a word. TeX'd Irish is therefore extremely difficult to read in the source file. This can be overcome in one of two ways: a. Use of an 8--bit-based version of TeX and an agreed character set (for example, the IBM PC character set) to represent the accented vowels as character codes 130 and 160--163 (\'e and \'a to \'u). Some other suitably-redundant character could then be used for a dotless "i", the characters made active and redefined to their accented versions in \TeX. The s\'e\i\.m\i\'u is rare enough to leave as a plain dot-over accent. b. Use of a front-end driver such as that written by the author for the PC-WRITE editor/wordprocessor, where the 8-bit characters mentioned above get translated into TeX source code, leaving the original text in an extended-ASCII wordprocessing file, where it is more easily legible. Some otherwise unused character can be usurped for dotless "i" (perhaps the vertical bar, which appears as a broken bar on many screens), and the dot-over accent can be forced as a TeX literal command when needed. Further marks, such as those required when reproducing ancient texts, can normally be dealt with by use of TeX's remaining diacriticals. __10 ********************************************************************** * Non-English Hyphenation and TeX * ********************************************************************** Using non-English hyphenation patterns and TeX requires a bit more effort than simply using an ordinary macro package. Because TeX only allows the \patterns command in IniTeX, one *must* create a new FMT file for each hyphenation pattern to be used. Running IniTeX is a fairy straight-forward procedure. For the most part, it is identical to TeX with a few exceptions. You should have some sort of executable file for IniTeX on your system and be able to access it (on many microcomputer ports of TeX, IniTeX is included in the TeX program and accessed as an option--see your manual for details). For plain TeX and AmS-TeX, all that is required is to create a new copy of plain TeX replacing \input hyphen with \input and renaming the newly modified file. For example, for Italian TeX, one could create a file itplain.tex that is identical to plain TeX except that it inputs ithyphen instead of hyphen. This file can then be run through IniTeX using a command sequence something like the following: INITEX (This is TeX version 2.93 etc.) ** itplain \dump [many lines of output here] The resulting output file, ITPLAIN.FMT can then be used for Italian TeXing with a command along the lines of TEX &ITPLAIN [the rest of a normal command line here] You may want to create a command ITEX (or whatever would be mnemonic for the language you are creating an FMT for) either by creating a new executable file (if your implementation supports this) or doing one of the following depending on your operating system: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- VAX/VMS (Stanford Implementation) put the line $ITEX :== $TEX$EXE:TEX &ITPLAIN in the TeX setup com file. Be sure to change TeX$EXE to the directory containing the .EXE file for TeX. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- VM/CMS (Stanford Implementation) create a file ITEX EXEC containing the following: /* To allow long command lines on the TeX Command */ Parse Arg Line Push '&ITPLAIN' Line Address Command 'TEX' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IBM PC (PCTeX) create a file ITEX.BAT containing the following line TEX &ITPLAIN %1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- By modifying the names above, one can easily create versions of TeX for any foreign language. The process for changing the hyphenation for LaTeX is similar (Hyphen.TeX is read in by the file Lplain.TeX), but more elaborate changes are necessary since LaTeX specifies so much of the user's formatting. __11 TeXMaG is an independantly published electronic magazine available free of charge to all interested parties reachable by electronic mail. It is published sporadicly, and the editor likes to think that its monthly so the readers humor him. Subscription requests should be sent to Don Hosek or send the following message to LISTSERV@BYUADMIN: SUBS TEXMAG-L Your_Full_Name. European subscribers may send the SUBS command to LISTSERV@DEARN, subscribers on CDNnet should send subscription requests to (being sure to mention that they wish to subscribe to TeXMaG), and JANET subscribers should send requests to be added to the list to Peter Abbott, . Back issues are available for anonymous FTP in the file BBD:TEXMAG.TXT on SCIENCE.UTAH.EDU. BITNET users may obtain back issues from LISTSERV@TCSVM (in an interactive message or as the first line of a mail file, send the command GET TEXMAG VvNn where v is the volume number and n is the issue number), or from UBSERVE@UBVMSC (in an interactive message, send the command SEND TEXMAG.VvvvNnnn where vvv and nnn are as above). Janet users may obtain back issues from Peter Abbott (e-mail address above) and DECNET/SPAN users may obtain them from the Decnet repository (see below). They may also be obtained from Don Hosek . Article submissions, contributions for the Toolbox, and letters to the editor are always welcome and should be sent to . Other publications of interest to TeX users are: TeXHAX. Arpanet mailing list for persons with questions, suggestions, etc.. about TeX, LaTeX, MetaFont and related programs. Submissions for this list should be sent to . Internet subscribers may subscribe by sending a request to . JANET subscribers should send subscription requests to . BITNET users may subscribe by sending the following command (as an interactive message or as the first line of a mail message) to LISTSERV@TAMVM1: SUBS TEX-L your_full_name. The list is peer-linked to other listserves in the United States and Europe. Australian users should send subscription requests to Japanese users should send subscription requests to . Back issues are available by anonymous FTP from Score.Stanford.Edu and from Listserv@Tamvm1 (in an interactive message or as the first line of a mail file send the command GET TEXHAXnn yy where nn is the issue number and yy are the last two digits of the year. Issues 100 and above are named TEXHAnnn yy) Unix-TeX. Arpanet mailing list specifically for users of TeX under the Unix operating system. Submissions for this list should be sent to . Requests to be added or deleted from the mailing list should be sent to . UKTeX. A U.K. version of TeXhax. To subscribe, send a note to Peter Abbott at . TeXline. A TeX newsletter edited by Malcolm Clark. To subscribe, send a note to . TUGBoat. A publication by the TeX Users Group. An excellant reference for TeX users. For more information about joining TUG and subscribing to TUGBoat send (real) mail to: TeX Users Group c/o American Mathematical Society P. O. Box 9506 Providence, RI 02940-9506, USA Inquiries may be directed to Karen Butler . LaTeX-style collection. A collection of LaTeX files is available for FTP and mail access at cayuga.cs.rochester.edu. To obtain files via FTP, login to cayuga.cs.rochester.edu (192.5.53.209) as anonymous, password guest and go to the directory public/latex-style (where the files are). The file 00index contains a brief description of current directory contents. If your site does not have FTP access, you may obtain files by mail by sending a message to latex-style@cs.rochester.edu with the subject "@file request". The first line of the body of the message should be an @. The second line should contain a mail address from rochester TO you (for example, if you are user@site.bitnet, the second line should be user%site.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu). The lines that follow should be the filenames you desire and the last line should also contain only an @. LISTSERV@DHDURZ1 has file archives of interest to TeX users. Included are the Beebe drivers and contents of the LaTeX style collection, as well as some TeX macros. Many files are available only in German. LISTSERV@TAMVM1 also has file archives that may be of interest to TeX users on BITNET, including the files from the Score.Stanford.EDU FTP directories and back issues of TeXHAX. For a list of files available, send the following command to LISTSERV@TAMVM1: GET TeX FILELIST. DECNET. There is a TeX file collection on DECnet accessible from DECnet and SPAN. Available files include the Beebe DVI drivers, the LaTeX style collection, and back issues of TeXhax, TeXMag, and UKTeX. For more information, contact Marisa Luvisetto (DECNET: <39947::luvisetto>, Bitnet: ) or Massimo Calvani U.S. Users should contact Ed Bell <7388::Bell> JANET. Peter Abbott keeps an archive of TeX-related files available for FTP access. For more information send mail to . Special thanks to those who contributed to this issue, Character code reference: Upper case letters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Lower case letters: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Digits: 0123456789 Square, curly, angle braces, parentheses: [] {} <> () Backslash, slash, vertical bar: \ / | Punctuation: . ? ! , : ; Underscore, hyphen, equals sign: _ - = Quotes--right left double: ' ` " "at", "number" "dollar", "percent", "and": @ # $ % & "hat", "star", "plus", "tilde": ^ * + ~