[tex-eplain] German.sty does not work in (e)plain.tex

[Michael Weller]

Hello John,

thanks for your reply. Now, that would be a different approach, I think it
would remove the need for german.sty alltogether. Unicode is in principle
fine, and yes I could use it.

However, this is also for some old documents and I must admit I'm now quite
used to the "a and "s stuff. These macros from german.sty work well, but it
doesn't get the hyphenation pattern. Now, in principle I can watch the
printout and use \- where needed. But it's so easy to overlook something.

Michael Weller.

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: John Was [mailto:john.was at ntlworld.com]
> Gesendet: Montag, 8. Februar 2010 09:27
> An: Michael Weller
> Betreff: Re: [tex-eplain] German.sty does not work in (e)plain.tex
> 
> Hello
> 
> I use plain XeTeX from the TeXLive distribution, and the following
> (supplied
> I think by Karl from an earlier thread) gives me hyphenation patterns for
> German, if that is basically what you are after:
> 
> \begingroup
> 
> \catcode`@=11%
> 
> \gdef\eplainsetlanguage#1#2#3{%
> 
> % do not set the language if the name is undefined in the current TeX.
> 
> \expandafter\ifx\csname lang@#1\endcsname \relax
> 
> \message{no patterns for #1}%
> 
> \else
> 
> \global\language = \csname lang@#1\endcsname
> 
> \fi
> 
> % but there is no harm in adjusting the hyphenmin values regardless.
> 
> \global\lefthyphenmin = #2\relax
> 
> \global\righthyphenmin = #3\relax
> 
> }%
> 
> \endgroup
> 
> \def\german{\eplainsetlanguage{ngerman}{2}{3}}
> 
> \def\germanold{\eplainsetlanguage{german}{2}{3}}
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Is that any use?  You would need to put it at the start of the files you
> want to typeset.  With XeTeX you would normally use the Unicode characters
> for German sorts such as the eszett (ensuring that you are using a font
> that
> has these characters!), but I think there is a package that will interpret
> \ss and so on (converting them to ß etc. on the fly) for legacy documents
> if
> you don't want to do multiple search-and-replaces on your existing files.
> (That package may only work with LaTeX documents, though.)
> 
> 
> 
> But perhaps this isn't quite what you're after.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> John
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