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

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hello everyone,

To Ilmars: thanks a lot for posting the question.
To Arthur: thanks a lot for pointing me to the link.
To Jânis (author of patterns): I'm CC-ing the thread to you, so that
you will be informed about it. I might send you an additional mail
with more detailed instructions off-list (unless Arthur does the
introduction instead of me while I'm traveling around).

A request to both native speakers: it would be really nice if you
could arrange that your hyphenation patterns would be listed on
    http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

They are on
   http://ftp.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/contrib/dictionaries/hyph_lv_LV.zip
but they are well hidden. I have never heard about them until Arthur
has sent me the link.

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:43 PM, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
>        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.

Apparently there has been a reason for that. See below.

>> 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.

Apart from what Arthur says:

1.) Take a look at
- http://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/xelatex/polyglossia/
- http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/babel/

I would suggest you to translate files on both links, but try to ask
François for details (he's in the list of recipients as well, I'm not
sure if he's subscribed). I don't have much experience with ldf files.

2.) If you feel like translating, it would be interesting to translate
the ConTeXt commands as well. See:
- http://source.contextgarden.net/lang-bal.tex
- http://source.contextgarden.net/lang-ger.tex

I don't remember seing any Latvian user on the ConTeXt mailing list so
far, but someone needs to start :)

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

That's usually true, but not always. OOo uses some compression, but I
have no idea how the file has been prepared. In normal cases, the
patterns from OOo should be OK for TeX.

>>                                                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

I was browsing that list while adding the rest of patterns and I think
that I checked the complete list. Indeed, Latvian was not listed
there. Can you the Latvians arrange that, so that this will be fixed?

>> 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.

And also make sure that François adds translations to his polyglossia.

>  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.

[I guess none. See below.]

> 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.

I checked the character set.

amacron, emacron, imacron, umacron
ccaron, scaron, zcaron
gcommaaccent, kcommaaccent, lcommaaccent, ncommaaccent

Unless a group of Latvian people comes forward and does some really
ugly work, I think that the only sensible thing to do is to support
UTF-8 engines only.

How many people in Latvia are using TeX? How do they deal with
translations and hyphenation at the moment?

To Ilmars: it's no problem to add hyphenation patterns, but I would
stongly recommend you to use XeLaTeX instead of pdflatex or latex for
typsetting Latvian then. With pdfTeX you'll never get the hyphenation
& letters to work properly unless you do some really dirty & more and
more obsolete job with fonts. I would not recommend doing it. It will
bring you more problems than advantages.

Try to google for XeLaTeX, try to play with it a bit, try to translate
files linked above, and in the meantime we can add hyphenation
patterns to hyph-utf8, at least for XeTeX.

Mojca