[tex-live] A fix for (pdf)LaTeX support for Romanian

Vasile Gaburici vgaburici at gmail.com
Thu Aug 21 11:48:40 CEST 2008


On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 11:32 AM, Robin Fairbairns
<Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think you're right, because googling for "latex romanian" gives me:
>> 1) An 1996-vintage RomanianTeX package on CTAN, which requires
>> rebuilding latex.fmt; clearly overkill these days.
>
> doesn't the babel package turn up?  i don't know who suggested it, but i

Nope, not on google...

> seem to have:
>
>    A LaTeX2e package for type-setting Romanian in a TeX environment.
>    For LaTeX use, the package has been superseded by the Romanian
>    option of <xref refid='babel'>babel</xref>.
>
> in the catalogue for romaniantex.  (i had taken it to be a package
> rather than a format, from reading the readme rather than the code.
> building a format, there, is merely to get hyphenation patterns loaded,
> which is done rather more simply nowadays using the distribution config
> command.)

Well it's good that it was marked obsolete.  But both the old package
and the babel romanian.{sty,ldf} files use cedilla glyphs for
Romanian, which is incorrect. Unicode added the proper comma-below
code-points in 1999 (version 3.0). People patched latin10
[http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=119531] and utf8x
[http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=234338] input
encodings with the new comma-below LICRs, but they forgot about font
encodings and babel it seems. Babel doesn't set up the fonts encodings
anyway, because it's not its job.

It will probably be necessary to write a new ldf for babel, or provide
the current one with an  option between cedilla/comma-below. How was
the 1996 German writing spelling reform handled? Note in the case of
Romanian there was no spelling reform for the comma-below glyphs; only
Unicode was "reformed" in 1999 to handle it. FYI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_alphabet#Unicode_and_HTML

BTW, it would be nice if TeXLive had bug tracking system of its own...

>> So, I will make a tiny package for CTAN package after all.
>
> good.  it's the sort of thing that will end up being swept up into some
> other package, but it's good to make life easier for other users in the
> mean time.

That's cool with me, although I'm not aware of any package that
automatically sets up font encodings for various languages like babel
does for hyphenation...

> Robin Fairbairns
>
> For the CTAN team
>
>


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