[tex-live] Re: antomega [was: Multilingual LaTeX: Greek, English, and UTF-8]

[Hans Hagen]

Alexej Kryukov wrote:

>I am sorry, but this solution just messes things up. Regarding
>the hyphen.cfg file, I have already explained that it is needed
>
>-- to prevent loading babel's hyphen.cfg into the lambda/lamed
>formats;
>
>  
>
loading of (files that contain) macros can be handled at the macro 
package level; maybe babel can determine that it's unwanted and should 
not be loaded; maybe there is some magic babel command that you can set 
so that it will signal babel that it's already 'loaded'

>-- to set \catcode, \lccode and \uccode values for some Unicode
>characters.
>  
>
same

>The first task is optional, but desired (because Babel's model
>of i18n is quite useless in the context of omega). The second task is
>almost mandatory, because loading huge lists of character codes
>at the runtime is surely something that should be avoided. However,
>the default omega distribution currently doesn't provide any
>standard way to do these things (previously omega has its own
>hyphen.cfg, which was abandoned for unknown reasons). 
>  
>
there is not so much as a curren tomega distribution at least it's not 
maintained; if you want antomega to take over maybe best is top copy all 
the relevant omega files to your package and maintain them there (it 
also give syou the opportunity to fix them)

>So, by turning antomega into separate format (and leaving lambda/lamed
>in their present state) you just encourage lambda/lamed users to always
>load useless Babel extensions and to invent some non-standard ways of
>loading character codes into format (e. g. by hacking hyphenation
>patterns, as Apostolos Syropoulos sometime proposed), while antomega
>would provide a standard and elegant (I hope) way to do that.
>
>  
>
as has been mentioned a few times in this (long thread): antomega has 
all the characteristics of a separate package / format, so that's the 
way to go and organize it; by treating it 'generic' or 'on top of 
whatever future packages may run into troubles; keep in mind that file 
searching has unpredicatable aspects: if you have whatever/abc and 
whatever/def and both have something hyphen.tex, you cannot predict 
which one is taken (directory search order may depend on creation time, 
sort order, etc); let's imagine sort order, in that case antomega (being 
on top in the alphabet) will be found first, and all later packages may 
suffer from file name clashes (this is why there may not be duplicate 
filenames in tex trees unless clearly distinguishable by package / 
engine / progname); so ...  for the best of all: think of antomega as a 
'macro package of its own' and if needed, copy all lambda and omega code 
(maybe different filenames) to your antimega tex cs paths

>And of course, if somebody has built his lambda with antomega's
>hyphen.cfg, this doesn't necessarily mean (s)he also has to invoke
>the antomega.sty package from all his/her lambda documents. In fact, 
>(s)he may use any other packages of his/her choice, but still take
>advantage of *some* features antomega provides (like lists of
>character codes or hyphenation patterns). This is quite similar to
>Babel, which has different levels of support for latex and plain
>tex. If you create a separate format for antomega, you will
>just prohibit access to antomega's capacities to other omega-based
>(or aleph-based) formats. 
>  
>
hyphenation pattersn may be engine specific (tex vs omega) but they are 
also macro package specific (since they can contain macros), actually, 
many of the pattern files under generic are not generic at all; i see no 
reason why antomega patterns should be generic; maybe now (because there 
are not that many omega packages) but maybe not in the future (i didn;t 
look at the patterns, but with regards to context i've learned that 
assuming that patterns are generic is a mistake)

Hans 

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