Re: [help-texinfo] hyphenation with texinfo

[Karl Berry]

    plain.fmt and latex.fmt are binary files. Do I need to regenarate them?

Your latex.fmt is ok, it defines Italian hyphenations (as \language14).

But yes, it seems plain.fmt (really tex.fmt) must be regenerated, you
probably only have English patterns loaded there.  Texinfo is loaded on
top of plain TeX.

    Do you have other suggestions to have a complete solution?

I don't know what TeX system you have.  On mine (TeX Live 2004, which is
based on teTeX), there's a file fmtutil.cnf which contains the
following:

# Change "tex.ini -> bplain.ini" and "- -> language.dat"
# if you want babel support in tex. [...]
tex             tex             -               tex.ini

Accordingly, I changed that line to read:
tex             tex             language.dat            bplain.ini

Then I deleted tex.fmt (in texmf-var/web2c/), and ran  tex story .
mktexfmt then regenerated tex.fmt with all the languages.

Then, prepending the following line to your .texi file before the \input
texinfo should, I think, switch to Italian:

address@hidden address@hidden
\input texinfo
...

For posterity, here is one informative thread on the subject:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/bad25f9c44626922

If this turns out to work, I can document all this and make texinfo.tex
do the right thing automatically based on the @documentlanguage.

Hope this helps,
karl