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

[Ilmars Poikans]

Hello,

Thanks for quick response :)

Below, is response to Arthur post.

 >> 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

Yes, http://sourceforge.net/projects/openoffice-lv/
I hope Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) 2.1 (that's license in hyph readme) is ok to include 
those patterns in Tex?

 > 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.

I have cleaned up hyphenation file (removed patterns, which repeated, and commented out two 
patterns, about which tex complained, that they are dublicates, but I didn't find any repeats)

There wasn't any problems when running xelatex with this hyphenation file, but non-unicode engines 
complained about invalid patterns. I guess \input conv-utf8-ec.tex in loadhyph-lv.tex isn't the 
right convertor. Probably there aren't all latvian special characters available in any encoding in 
Tex. So, what should we do with 8bit engines and patterns?

 > 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.

Won't there be problems with special Latvian chars? I have found some quite old latvian.ldf files in 
Internet, they prepend \=, \c, \v, before special chars. Here is link below:

http://home.lanet.lv/~drikis/TeX/

I don't know if you will see special latvian chars in table, but I can prepare list of latvian char 
codes in unicode and ISO8859-13 (win-1257 in windows) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-13).

Already existing gloss-latvian.ldf in Xelatex polyglossia package gives all(?) translations. 
Questions remains how to encode special chars in them.

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

Hopefully I'll be able to do everything necessary to add Latvian to Tex :)

 > 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.

I would prefer everything in Unicode :) I guess almost all documents nowadays are written in unicode 
(openoffice, ms office). There is also 8bit encoding ISO8859-13 (win-1257 in windows) for Baltic states.

That 8bit charset should cover latvian, estonian and lithuanian languages, but I don't know what 
encoding are used in Lith and Estonian latex packages, but for Latvian it is standart for quite long 
time. There was latvian specific encoding in ancient times (even before Win 95), but I guess it is 
dead for long time, because of ISO standarts coming in place.

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

I can't allow Latvian be too long behind other Baltic states :)

Best regards,
Ilmars