[tex-live] pdftex choking on czhyph

Thomas Esser te@dbs.uni-hannover.de
Thu, 10 Oct 2002 02:13:36 +0200


> IMHO this is the principial bug of names convention very closelly
> connected to the DEK's Copyright. The pdftex.ini file have not to call the
> babel macros!

That's your opinion, ok. You have a special format (csplain) for your
users, but that's not true for most other TeX users. And users of other
languages benefit from an easy way to set up hyphenation.

So, I prefer to solve the technical problem which is to avoid loading
czhyphen.tex for plain-based formats instead of going into the "you
must do that, you must not do that" discussion. I am not going into this
discussion, because (in contrast to TeX) there is no legal basis for this.

So, for the technical solution:

1) putting czhyphen.tex somewhere below texmf/tex/generic is wrong if
   this file is not really generic. Files in generic should always be
   compatible with plain (at least). If it works with csplain / cslatex,
   I suggest to put it into texmf/tex/csplain. If it works with latex /
   cslatex, I suggest to put it into texmf/tex/latex/misc.

2) I suggest to put a new language.dat into texmf/tex/plain/config

The language.dat file in 2) will be used for all plain-based format
files which do not have their own language.dat file (e.g. frtex). And,
this language.dat fill not have a commented or uncommented line for
czech.

> We suppose the same output from the "tex document" command as from
> the "pdftex document" command, only the format of output isn't dvi

No. pdftex is not TeX.

> In 1999, I have added some lines of
> macros to czhyph.tex in order to it may be included in babelised
> LaTeX too. I am not supporting babelised plain, because the csplain
> is sufficient.

What is this czhyph.tex you are talking about? I cannot find it on CTAN
and I cannot find it in the .tar.gz archives I found on the cstex server.

$ ls -l /t/ctan/language/hyphenation/czhyph.tex
-rwxrwxrwx    1 te       users       30435 Dec  4  1991 /t/ctan/language/hyphenation/czhyph.tex

> The CSTeX (namelly the formats csplain and cslatex) is not responsible
> to this bug, but the TeX live with this bug is unusable for Czech
> users. So, I am asking the author of the change in pdftex.ini file:

Sure, I see this as a TeX Live bug (and teTeX has the same bug,
too). I suggest a fix based on having a special language.dat in
texmf/tex/plain/config:

$ fmtutil --showhyphen pdftex
/software/oss/Text/teTeX-1.0/share/texmf/tex/plain/config/language.dat

$ fmtutil --showhyphen latex
/software/oss/Text/teTeX-1.0/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/language.dat

texconfig is smart enough to edit the right file, e.g. when running
  texconfig hyphen pdftex

Thomas