[OS X TeX] LaTeX in Languages Other Than English

[Roussanka Loukanova]

Hi,

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Jonathan Dann wrote:

> Hi Guys,
>
> I need a bit of information here, when someone writes in LaTeX in non-Roman 
> scripts, i.e. Japanese, Korean, Arabic, are the commands like \section still 
> written in Roman, or are they translated, too?  Am I right in understanding 
> that the encodings that many would use for these languages would be UTF-8?

I have done few tests with Bulgarian and Russian languages, both of which 
use Cyrillic, but are somehow different, esp with respect to hyphenation. I 
found several options for encodings for those languages. In all cases,
the LaTeX commands are the way they are, you do not translate them (as 
one wouldn't dare to translate programming languages). In order to 
switch between languages you would use a command like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[koi8-r]{inputenc}
\usepackage[bulgarian,english]{babel}

\selectlanguage{bulgarian}
Bla-bla in cyrillic...
\selectlanguage{english}
bla-bla

For Cyrillic, one can type the text in the Latin alphabet (by standard
phonetic correspondence), in the tex file (with the exceptions of several 
special letters), but the typeset output will be in Cyrillic letters. For 
small documents this works nicely, esp if one need to sent out the latex 
code by email, with no problems due to platforms.

Emacs has options to switch between alphabets (languages).

For special writing systems, like Japanese and Korean, in latex, and that 
on Macs, perhaps you can ask the Carbon Emacs people:
<http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html>

The same what they do should work somehow with TeXShop too.
But may be somebody on this list will give a better guide than me.

Roussanka


  >
> Thanks, as always, for any time you give me.
>
> Jon
>
> Jonathan P Dann: Trainee Medical Physicist - Homepage - Flickr
> contact | j.p.dann at gmail.com - 07515-352-490 | skype - jonathandann
>
>