[tex-hyphen] Adding latvian language (hyphenation and babel)

[Arthur Reutenauer]

	Hello Ilmars,

> I tried to use latex and missed normal latvian language support.

  Indeed.  I don't think there has ever been Latvian support in
mainstream TeX distributions.

> If there is some person, who could guide me through the whole process of 
> adding new language and tell me what information is needed, I would be very 
> glad to add one more language to the tex language list.

  I would be happy to do that.  It is not very difficult and I'll try to
sum it up below.  I don't know how familiar you are with LaTeX, so, if
anything is not clear, feel free to ask me in private.

> Is hyphenation patterns in tex is in the same format as in openoffice 
> hyphenation files (besides headers, encoding)?

  Yes, exactly the same.

>                                                There is free openoffice 
> hyphenation pattern for latvian available.

  Right, found them.  Funny that they are not listed in
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

> Is there step by step manual what to do to add new language?

  Oh ... I don't think there is :-)  Maybe some old docs, though.

>                                                              Or there are 
> mainteners for hyphenation and babel, whom I should contact about adding 
> new language?

  Since recently, there is a package for hyphenation patterns that is
called hyph-utf8, and maintained by Mojca Miklavec and me.  We can add
the Latvian patterns right away.  The Babel maintainer is Johannes
Braams, but he tends to be quite unresponsive and updates Babel very
infrequently.  But you don't actually need to go through him in order to
add a new language to Babel.  All you need is to create a latvian.ldf
file containing, at least, the translations for the captions
(\prefacename, \refname, etc.  Just look up any *.ldf file for the
list), and any setting you need for typesetting Latvian.

  Of course, once you have created that file, I encourage you to upload
it to CTAN.

  Something we need to know for the hyph-utf8 package is what font
encoding you use in LaTeX.  Is there some preferred encoding for Latvian
TeX documents?  Unfortunately we don't support multiple encodings for
the moment, but that's on our roadmap.

  Incidentally, we added Lithuanian patterns last week, so Latvian will
be a welcome addition :-)

	Best,

		Arthur