a bilingual English/French groff document (was: an observation and proposal about hyphenation codes)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Sigfrid,

At 2024-08-07T10:30:59+0200, Sigfrid Lundberg wrote:
> I have strong feelings when it comes to multilinguality. A background:
> I have a pre-retirement background in giving support to research in
> arts and humanities. Occasionally I have had the opportunity to use
> groff for that.  The PDF catalogue of St Laurentius Digital Manuscript
> library is an example of that. See
> 
> https://github.com/siglun/laurentius/blob/main/catalogue/catalogue.pdf
> 
> It is written in English, but contains implicits, explicits, rubrics
> etc in perhaps a half dozen languages (.hy), each of which could
> benefit from its own hyphenation mode (.hla). The Greek in this
> catalogue is medieval, not modern
> 
> https://github.com/siglun/laurentius/blob/main/catalogue/Mh_54.pdf
> 
> which on its own was exercise. I'm not sure but I believe I used
> English hyphenation throughout the  text, which is mostly in English,
> Latin and Danish.

Well, since groff has no hyphenation pattern files for Danish or Latin,
this is probably the best that can be done, unless you wanted to disable
hyphenation entirely for those two languages.

I am attaching an example of a bilingual English and French groff
document to illustrate how one might undertake such a thing.

> To me, Scientific type-setting and multilinguality is the raison
> d'etre for groff and its competitors.

I'm very happy to hear that you have found groff satisfactory for your
purposes to date.  Please let us know of any ideas you have for its
improvement.

> I'm a groff user (groff@gnu.org subscriber) since 1989 when I failed
> to install TeX on my workstation.

Not an uncommon experience, I think--apparently installing TeX used to
be so notoriously difficult that O'Reilly found it profitable to publish
a book on TeX, much of the page count of which was given over to helping
the reader actually get the system installed.

I remember when distributions like TeX Live came along and were very
warmly received for finally solving a problem that Knuth didn't find
interesting.  (Not that I blame him.  His talents are better applied to
producing as much TAOCP as possible before God calls him home.)

Regards,
Branden

bilingual-en-fr.groff
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