[tex-hyphen] tl2011-pretest: loadhyph-sr-cyrl.tex still not activated by default?

Arthur Reutenauer arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org
Wed Jun 1 16:02:26 CEST 2011


	Hi,

> I understood that conclusion was reached to load both patterns by
> default in Unicode-aware engines. Anyway, IMHO loading both is the most
> convenient for end users. These patterns are disjunct. I've been using
> them in that way for many years.
> 
> (I think that Karl and Arthur made a decision on how to do this.)

  There has been no real decision at the time; Karl has only reacted
early in the discussion you mentioned to say that having TeX Live's
build scripts generate "serbian loadhyph-sr-cyrl.tex loadhyph-sr-latn.tex"
in language.dat would be require a lot of changes in the infrastructure,
and I replied that it would be no problem for Mojca and me to generate a
loadhyph-sr.tex that contains both pattern sets (so that language.dat
would only need to contain the line "serbian loadhyph-sr.tex").  But we
haven't decided for any particular behaviour at the time.

> I know. I'd slightly prefer to have Cyrillic as default; I just don't
> know what kind of arguments apply here. If babel is the most relevant
> factor for pdftex (and for XeTeX/LuaTeX it isn't), let's decide
> according to the state of Serbian language in babel.

  In general, I would like to say that it's better to follow Babel
(since there is no clear-cut consensus for either option); however Babel
is completely broken in that particular case, as Mojca remarked in last
year's discussion: back when we started the hyph-utf8 project in 2008,
it loaded Cyrillic patterns while setting labels in Latin.  This is why
we switched the default patterns to Latin, in order to preserve
consistency.  The problem was that we could change the behaviour of the
hyphenation patterns since we were maintaining them, but not the
settings in Babel (and talking to Johannes Braams was no use either; I
tried).  Not a very good reason, but there was no better solution.

> Yes, it's possible to use babel with Serbian Cyrillic, at least with
> XeTeX. This is excerpt from one old file of mine (2007), don't know it
> it's relevant nowadays:
> 
> \usepackage{fontspec}
> \usepackage[serbian,greek,english]{babel}
> \def\cyrillicencoding{EU1}
> \let\greektext\relax
> 
> along with adding 'serbian xu-srhyphc.tex' to language.dat.

  Hum, that's good to know, but not really relevant here, as Polyglossia
does the job just as well.  I really think Mojca meant "Babel *and*
pdfTeX".

> To sum up: I strongly suggest loading both patterns for XeTeX/LuaTeX.

  I see no problem with that.  And I would advise to not change the
default in pdfTeX, because that would make the life of the (presumably)
few users who try to typeset Serbian with Babel pdfTeX even more
difficult.  Mojca?

	Arthur


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