[twg-tds] [gaulle@idris.fr: a TDS question]

[Vladimir Volovich]

"BG" == Bernard Gaulle writes:

 >> teTeX has a few non-unique names in texmf/tex. One example is
 >> fonttext.cfg: texmf/tex/generic/config/fonttext.cfg
 >> texmf/tex/cslatex/fonttext.cfg

 BG> right, but this is a format dependant solution. The question i
 BG> reported was related to multilingual documents and as such fully
 BG> format independant.

if you'd like to search file.kbc depending on the current document
language, it will require interaction metween macro-layer (to pass the
current language name to TeX the program), TeX the program (to pass
the language name to kpathsea), and kpathsea. Since it's unlikely that
TeX will be changed, it will unlikely be implemented. It is possible
to avoid changing TeX the program, by passing the current language as
part of file name, as Karl suggested (french/file.kbc or fr-file.kbc
or french-file.kbc).

 >> In this particular case, it seems like a document has to say (the
 >> equivalent of) \input french/latin1.kbc anyway, not just \input
 >> latin1.kbc.  Doesn't that work, even though latin1.kbc is not
 >> unique?

 BG> unfortunately it should be \input french:latin1.kbc on Mac \input
 BG> french\latin1.kbc on Windows \input french/latin1.kbc on Unix a
 BG> quite ugly solution.

i may be wrong, but i think that implementations of kpathsea on Mac,
Windows and Unix all accept "/" as directory separator, so
"french/latin1.kbc" will work everywhere (where kpathsea is used)

 >> If it doesn't, all I can think of to do is adding ugly prefixes or
 >> suffixes to make them unique, such as
 >> french/fr-latin1.kbc
 >> german/de-latin1.kbc

 BG> in that case: fr-latin1.kbc de-latin1.kbc

 BG> but as there is no link between, eg "german" and "de"

but this link can be established on macro level.

Best,
v.