Re: Plethora of encodings, does it matter? At 14:11 3/5/2002 +0100, Bernd Raichle wrote:

>  > The question wasn't why you should support some other encoding,
>  > but why style file so often use code that requires that the encoding
>  > be taken into account at all.  It would be best if all that was left 
> to the
>  > xxxenc.def file and the style not make any references to the
>  > encoding at all.
>
>This is ok for macro packages used with LaTeX only but there are macro
>packages which can be used with plain etc.  You have mentioned
>``ngerman.sty'' resp. ``german.sty''.  These packages can be used with
>Plain TeX and LaTeX.

Oh. I forgot about that.

I tend to deal with plain TeX and LaTeX 2.09 by \\inputting a separate
file to deal with encoding issues, e.g \\input texnansi % for LY1.
That currently does not define the various quotes, even though it
defines other things like \\S and \\P, \\trademark, \\copyright etc.
So it wouldn't help with "ngerman".

>Because Plain TeX does not support font encodings I have to use the
>old Knuthian CM text font encoding which is called ``OT1'' in LaTeX as is.
....

>Nobody is perfect, thus I have implemented a scheme with some
>deficiencies, e.g. the implementation for the left and right german
>quotation marks \\glqq-\\glqq is asymmetric whereas it would be better
>to do it more properly in a symmetric way.  I already have a newer
>versions where this is fixed and I hope to release it as soon as I
>find enough free time to do some tests (including LY1 support,
>Berthold, I have received your mail concerning the same design flaw).

Great! Thanks.

>For ``german.sty'' I have tried my best to support font encodings, as
>many LaTeX(e) versions (starting from the one 1994/06/01 upto now ;-),
>LaTeX 2.09, Plain TeX etc. and had done a lot of tests with many TeX
>format files and macro file sets to remove as many bugs as possible.

Regards, Berthold.
________
>Bernd Raichle                                  "Le langage est source
>Autor des `german.sty' (aktuell: v2.5e)         de malentendus"
>DE-TeX-FAQ: http://www.dante.de/faq/de-tex-faq/ (A. de Saint-Exupery)

--
Berthold K.P. Horn mailto:bkph@ai.mit.edu http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/bkph (BK)