Re: text encoding compatibility

[Lars Hellström <Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se>]

Laurent SIEBENMANN <Laurent.SIEBENMANN@math.u-psud.fr> wrote:
>Chris defends LaTeX not TeX as a whole. This sounds much
>worse for TeX itself than it really is. TeX has just one
>nasty caprice in this area. Recall that, in the hyphenation,
>process, TeX applies the lowercase 'function' before looking
>up the possible hyphenation points in the words of a
>paragraph. The caprice is that it is the particular value of
>the lowercase function (\lccode values) in vigour when the
>paragraph is closed that applies *throughout* the paragraph.
>That is a wierd limitation when one recalls that any number
>of different hyphenation tables can be successively called in
>the same paragraph, through the \language primitive.
>Clearly, this caprice is no constraint if the natural
>lowercase functions for all text fonts involved in the
>paragraph are one and the same. This sameness is the basic
>TeX encoding compatibility condition.

I just think it should be mensioned that this is one of the flaws of TeX
that e-TeX has fixed (by maintaining a separate lowercase table for
hyphenation purposes for each language).

Lars Hellström