From: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de (Joachim Schrod)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Which is better, OzTeX or Textures?
Date: 27 Jan 1993 11:25:47 GMT
Organization: TH Darmstadt, FG Systemprogrammierung
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: spice.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de

In article <1993Jan27.003132.1@hmcvax.claremont.edu>, dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu writes:
> 
> It sounds like you have either a poorly misinformed and
> maintained TeX system or something very strange is happening.
> Standard TeX can handle up to 256 different languages and
> eight-bit input. Michael Ferguson has made available some
> multilingual patches but they are really only necessary if you
> feel that it's absolutely necessary to be able to have eight bit
> control sequences.

Don, that's not correct.

TeX 3 is far away from a multi-lingual system; let's just have a look
if it can handle West European languages (eg, German ;-):

 -- You cannot hyphenate accented words.
 -- Words with explicite hyphens are hyphenated *only* at the
    explicite hyphens.

At least the first problem was solved in MLT\^eX. And in-so-far it's
much better than TeX 3 -- I always wondered why this was not imported
by DEK.
    Concerning the second problem -- of course it is not so visible
to English writers since you don't have many long words; but weren't
you ever annoyed that TeX hyphenated words like `a-priori' at the
hyphen and there was no way (except an \hbox) to prevent this? Why
aren't \righthyphenmin and \lefthyphenmin are not recognized in this
case? Note: Even though these are general complaints, I have to
handle this stuff in a lot of German texts I write -- but usually I
don't care in English texts.

Note also, that I don't speak here of `real' typesetting issues, just
of the very hard cases which do hinder the usage of TeX in a German
production environment. With `real' typesetting issues, I mean
automatic break-up of ligatures at compound words, weighting of
hyphenating places in compound words.

Oh yes, and the abstraction level of

> Personally, I think that the loss of an umlaut
> in a control sequence name is no bigger sacrifice than \@ne is
> for English speakers.

is much too low.

No TeX *user* has ever typed in \@ne. It is only used by TeX
*programmers*. And while I agree with you that a TeX programmer should
also be able to restrict himself from the usages of umlaut, a
secretary finds this really annoying.
    Please remember: For a secretary, this isn't a control sequence.
This is a tag within a general markup -- and why shouldn't a tag have
a proper name?

(Btw, not everyone agrees that \@ne is a well choosen name. Look at
the cs names in plain.tex and then read DEK's comment about Pascal
identifier names [it's in the WEB documentation]. If one of my
undergrad students would come to my office and would present me a
program with an identifier named `p@@@@s', I would know my
reaction...)

--
Joachim

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Joachim Schrod			Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

	    @d infinity=255 {$\infty$ (approximately)}
							[DEK, in weave.web]