Re: [Groff] man problem: Latin1 characters in nion-Latin1 locale

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Russian words in average are longer than English (the same applies
> to German, BTW :-) and without hyphenation display loks ugly, with
> several words and large inter-words gaps. I assume, we could find
> hypehnation table in TeX, just as for english - but here are some
> problems.
> 
> Currently, hyphenation table for US is uncondtitionally loaded. Is
> it possible to load more than one table, like Russian?

Yes.  I've just looked into the code, and I believe that it is
possible to use the `.hpf' request more than once.  To get bilingual
hyphenation patterns for both Russian and English (this is what you
want, isn't it?) just load the Russian pattern after (or before) the
English ones *without* using `.hla' to change the hyphenation
language.

Please test!  Of course, the question is which of the 6 (!) Russian
hyphenation patterns available in TeX's ruhyphen package (written by
Vladimir Volovich's and me) you want to use...  Since none of the
packages use macros, it should be possible to directly read the
patterns (after removing the \hyphenation{...} stuff which should be
put into a Russian start-up file using the `.hw' request.

> Second, there are three widely used russian charsets and one
> "standard" one.  Is it possible to access current locale in troffrc?
> Given possible variety of locale names, something like locale alias
> table looks reasonable. I may try to implement something like this.

Yes.  With the \V[...] you can access environment variables.  The
string manipulation functions of groff are very limited, but maybe it
is sufficient.  For the moment, you must convert the patterns into the
target encoding...

The final solution will be that the preprocessor converts everything
to UTF8...


    Werner