Re: texinfo supports non-English hyphenation

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I just compiled with the new language files and voila there is
> hyphenation, which was not there at least in the German docs.
> (Texlive 2007) Well, it is not as good as babel, while I don't
> really understand, what is the difference.

Words which contain ä, ö, ü, or ß are not hyphenated.  The first three
are composed characters in the cmr fonts (which texinfo currently uses
exclusively), and ß is at a different position (OT1 font encoding) as
the pattern encoding (T1).

> In the German hyphen file there is an example of exceptional
> hyphenations: should we add here all the cases in which the
> algorithm doesn't work?  It's maybe every tenth hyphenation, I
> guess.

If you see an incorrectly hyphenated word, it should be added, yes.

> In general, there are many issues with the pdfs that could be
> improved: in German there seems to be something like "french"
> spacing on, e g. after full stops is a bigger space. (As Werner
> pointed out, this has nothing to do with the spaces set in the
> source file.)

This is non-french spacing :-) German needs french spacing.  You can
activate this in the texinfo document with

  @frenchspacing on

[I'll report this to the texinfo people to add this as the default in
txi-de.tex.]

> Also each paragraph has both a skip and an indent.  This is
> redundant.  One of them should go.

From the texinfo info file:

  The Texinfo processors may insert whitespace at the beginning of the
  first line of each paragraph, thereby indenting that paragraph.  You
  can use the address@hidden' command to specify this indentation.
  Write an address@hidden' command at the beginning of a line
  followed by either `asis' or a number:

     @paragraphindent INDENT

    The indentation is according to the value of INDENT:

  `asis'
     Do not change the existing indentation (not implemented in TeX).

  `none'
  0
     Omit all indentation.

  N
     Indent by N space characters in Info output, by N ems in TeX.


    The default value of INDENT is 3.  address@hidden' is ignored
  for HTML output.

> Nice would be also some kind of protection for environments like
> those coding examples: something like at least 3 lines, otherwise it
> goes to the next page.

Use address@hidden ... @end group' for that.

> This is kind of widow (?) penalty, I don't know if the program
> supports this?  If etex is used as the setting machine then I guess
> it should be possible.

This is not (yet?) implemented.


    Werner