[XeTeX] Ancient Greek Hyphenation

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

Jeff,

I will try to answer your questions.  


>I think it would be helpful for those of us who are not LaTeX/XeTeX 
>gurus if you or someone gave step-by-step
>instructions on how to set up hyphenation for ancient greek. I have seen 
>a number of different opinions on how to
>set this up, but still am not sure which way is "correct."

I have been using LaTeX and babel for years and what I really want
to forget is all these tricks with active characters that allow one to
do one thing, but destroys some other things. In end you have to 
define mnay local scopes where each set of active characters is
defined, etc. It is like doing GOTO programming in the era of
object (and aspect) oriented programming. This is the reason
I do not like to use babel with XeTeX. Now, when Omega/Lambda
was introduced there was need for two different hyphen.cfg files
because Lambda did not like a number of things babel was doing.
And that is exactly the reason we need a new hyphen.cfg file.
In this file we define a new command for each set of hyphenation
patterns, which should be Unicode patterns, and that is all.
Here are again the contents of the file that I am using:

\message{Hyphenation patterns for American-English}
\newlanguage\american
\begingroup
\language\american
\input ushyphmax.tex
\endgroup
\input xgrmhyph.tex
\input xgrahyph.tex
\endinput

Suppose you want more languages, then just add the following code:

\newlanguage\MYLANGUAGE
\begingroup
\language\MYLANGUAGE
\input HYPHENATION-PATTERNS.tex
\endgroup

For example, here are the contents of a file that people are using to produce
a book:

\message{Hyphenation patterns for American-English}
\newlanguage\american
\begingroup
\language\american
\input ushyphmax.tex
\endgroup
\newlanguage\l at french
\begingroup
\language\l at french
\input frhyph.tex
\endgroup
\input xgrahyph.tex
\newlanguage\latin
\begingroup
\language\latin
\input lahyph.tex
\endgroup
\endinput

Noticed here how french is defined. This allows the use of babel...
Of course, when (!) xbabel will be available, I suppose there will
be a mechanism similar to the language.dat file.

>Could you give full instructions on how to set up xgreek? I tried to use 
>the package but got errors upon compiling
>complaining about the "moderngreek" label not being defined. Obviously I 
>am getting something wrong somewhere...

Now, you need to create your format file. If you have no problem using
a shell, then just type the necessary commands at the directory
where you have saved your copy of hyphen.cfg:

xelatex -ini -etex -jobname=xelatex latex.ltx

If you create your format file automatically, just rename the original
hyphen.cfg file to something like hyphen.cfg.old and copy the
new file there so that XeTeX will find it..

>I also noticed in one of your posts that you use a custom hyphen.cfg 
>file. Where do you put this file? If I do a search
>on my XeTeX distribution, I see a number of files with this exact name 
>in different folders. I find that a little confusing,
>so I think step-by-step instructions on how to really set this up would 
>be wonderful.

Now, the xgreek package should be used only if the main language of
your document is Greek (ancient or modern). If you just want to
typeset passages in Greek you can either define a command

\newcommand[\greektext][1]{{\langauge=\moderngreek #1}}
 
or 

\newcommand[\greektext][1]{{\langauge=\ancientgreek #1}}

depending on which hypehnation patterns you want to load.
To have a complete working example, I am attaching a test file to see 
what is going on. Now, if you want to use the xgreek paclage, loaded as
follows:

\usepackage[monotonic]{xgreek}

All LaTeX-language-specific strings will be replaced by Greek and in addition
you will be able to typeset dates, etc. To switch hyphenation patterns just
use the command \setlanguage{LANGUAGE}, where LANGUAGE is the name
of a  language as defined in hyphen.cfg

If there are any other questions, please send them to me privately, unless
you feel other will benefit from a public responce.

Regards,

Apostolos


****************************************************************
*Apostolos Syropoulos                                          *
*snail mail: 366, 28th October Str., GR-671 00  Xanthi, HELLAS *
*email     : asyropoulos (at) yahoo (dot) com                  *
*phone num.: +30-2541-028704                                   *
*home page : http://obelix.ee.duth.gr/~apostolo                *
****************************************************************






      
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