[tex-eplain] Changing hyphenation, fonts & encodings in Eplain

[Branden]

Hello.

I would like to typeset text in TeX in Portuguese, with output in PDF 
format. To do this, I need three things:

1. To hyphenate Portuguese words properly, I have to use the hyphenation 
patterns of pt8hyph.tex instead of the default hyphen.tex

2. To make TeX recognize and hyphenate words with accent, I have to use the 
Latin-1 encoding, both for input and for output. To do this, I have to use 
a T1/Cork encoding font. I also would like that \', \~, etc. still work in 
my manuscript.

3. To output PDF with the fonts looking good, I have to use Type 1 fonts, 
instead of the Metafont fonts, that are converted to Type 3 and render 
poorly in most PDF viewers, IIRC.

I know I can do this quite easily in LaTeX. For hyphenation I have only to 
edit the language.dat file and uncomment the portuges line. To use T1 
encoding, I can use the fontenc and inputenc packages. Using Type 1 fonts 
is also easy.

The problem is that LaTeX has an inflexible fixed layout. I like very much 
the idea of Eplain of providing only generic typesetting capabilities and 
letting me design my own layout.

I just don't know how I do this three things in Eplain! Could you perhaps 
help me?

Also, I would be interested in changing fonts (and maybe font encodings) 
amid my manuscript, so that I can use really different fonts for headings, 
footnotes, and the proper text. And, as well, I would be interested in 
typesetting in changing languages (hyphenation patterns), so that I can 
build one eplain format file and use it for Portuguese, English, German, 
French, etc.

Hope you can help me! TIA,

Branden