On 2014-06-11 at 20:27:59 +0100, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
> Unfortunately not, adding a new language is a highly specialised > area of TeX, and we're very few people working on language support > generally. But you're welcome to ask any questions here, of > course. > > As a side note, since your patterns are for Pāli in Latin > transliteration, I'd use the code pi-latin, instead of just pi, to > tag the language. It's true that adding a new language is a highly specialised area of TeX. On the other hand not many people are able to create hyphenation patterns themselves at all but making them available to TeX is not overly difficult. The only problem I see is that modern TeX distributions provide update facilities which overwrite your files if you aren't careful. IMO the best solution is to upload new patterns to CTAN. The main requirement is a proper license, of course. Development of hyphenation patterns is easier then. Determine the location of the language.dat file being used kpsewhich language.dat and copy it to the appropriate directory in TEXMFHOME or TEXMFLOCAL. If package updates provide new patterns, these new patterns will not be used. But if you intend to upload your patterns to CTAN anyway, this is only a temporary problem. I assume that while you are developing patterns for Pāli you are not interested in new patterns for, say, African languages provided by TeX Live, at least not for the time being. You certainly want to remove the stuff from TEXMFHOME/TEXMFLOCAL when your patterns are provided by TeX Live. A file like language-local.dat only makes sense for stuff you don't want/can share with others. It would be nice to have patterns for pi-latin on CTAN, at least if they are correct and the license is appropriate. Just to prevent people from re-inventing the wheel again and again. After all, the brute-force method described above works on all systems but only temporarily. In the long term you either have to put your stuff into a dedicated file like language-local.dat (this doesn't work everywhere) or you have to upload it to CTAN. IMO the latter solution is preferred. Krzysztof and Arthur, is it possible to prevent people from re-inventing the wheel again? I.e., push the patters to CTAN? Regards, Reinhard -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:[email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------
