[OS X TeX] non-english hyphenation in PlainTeX

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 21 oct. 04, à 17:36, Gianluca Gorni a écrit :

> I have tried to migrate some old Textures PlainTeX documents
> to TeXShop &co., and I have run into a couple of prolems.
>
> First: some page breaks have come out different, in pages with
> external graphics included. May it be that somehow the conversion
> of pictures from eps to pdf (through Panther's distiller) has changed
> the bounding boxes?
> Or the old BoxedEPSF works differently from graphicx regarding
> boxing pictures?

Yes, I think there are subtle differences between BoxedEPS and the 
LaTeX graphics package. epsf.tex (working onlyy with dvips, not pdfTeX) 
should be more standard, but lprobably less convenient to use.

> More important: I have not been able to activate the Italian
> hyphenation. When I iInstalled gwTeX, I configured for Italian,
> and in fact Italian *LaTeX* is fine. Perhaps PlainTeX was not
> configured? Or was it? What shall I do?

Plain TeX does not use hyphenation the same way that LaTeX does. In 
plain TeX the hyphenation patterns (i.e. languages) loaded at the time 
the plain TeX format was created are referenced by numbers, not name. 
There must be a way to determine which patterns were loaded and with 
which number, but I don't remember right now.

Both the graphics and the babel packages, originally from LateX, may be 
used, I think, with plain TeX, avoiding you the hard and tedious work. 
Babel runs out-of-the-box in plain TeX (that's why it is located in 
tex/generic instead of tex/latex). As for graphics, the file 
miniltx.tex was written to allow its use in plain TeX; see 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/plain/graphics/.

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin
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