Guide to LaTeX (4th Edition) (Tools and Techniques

11
Multilingual LAT E X
The original versions of T E X and L AT E X were set up for the English language,
American variant. The built-in hyphenation patterns were for English
only, and several English words such as ‘Figure’ and ‘Bibliography’ were
included explicitly in certain commands. This in fact violates the rules
of good programming which forbid doing anything explicitly. In Europe,
L AT E X users quickly made customizations for their particular languages.
The adaptation for German, german.sty, is a set of macros from many
contributors collected together by H. Partl of the Technical University of
Vienna, and has become the standard for the German-speaking T E X Users
Group (DANTE). It contains some facilities for other languages, including
French and English.
The key to the german package and other language adaptations is
the fact that the standard L AT E X document styles (and later classes for
L AT E X 2ε) had been altered so that explicit English words in the output were
replaced by reprogrammable command names. These names had become
standardized among European users for application to all languages. The
modified L AT E X version by J. Schrod from Darmstadt was known as IL AT E X,
for International L AT E X. These names and their standard English values
are to be found on page 459.
As of December 1, 1991, these naming features became part of the L AT E X
standard. They represent good programming practice, since they allow
even English-speaking users to change certain titles easily, for example
‘Abstract’ into ‘Summary’ or ‘Contents’ into ‘Table of Contents’. Naturally,
they were taken over, and extended upon, by L AT E X 2ε.
Another important feature for multilingual usage is the T E X \language
counter which allows more than one set of hyphenation patterns to be
stored in the format with initex (Section B.1.3). Different patterns are
activated by setting \language to the appropriate number. This is now
standard for all T E X version over 3.0, which should now be universal.
Individual language packages such as german maintained by Bernd
Raichle and french by Bernard Gaulle have now been superseded to a
large extent today by the universal multilanguage system: babel.
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