Language support in jadetex?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:47:51 +0900 (JST), Hiroki Sato <hrs at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr> wrote
>   in <87wskptbb2.fsf at kobe.laptop>:
>
> ke> I don't know if this is a FAQ, but I've been trying to find a way to
> ke> create readable Greek PDF output with jadetex, and I'm kind of stuck
> ke> there.
> ke>
> ke> The PDF file *is* created, but the Greek text is typeset with fonts that
> ke> look likeISO 8859-1, so the text is unreadable.
> ke>
> ke> Does anyone know how I can tweak jadetex to use a different charset?
> ke>
> ke> A pointer to jadetex docs would be sufficient, but a quick search at
> ke> Google didn't produce something that looks useful :-/
>
> Could you tell me what is needed for TeX to process Greek?  I am not
> familiar with Greek but I think it is possible to adjust JadeTeX to
> Greek if TeX is working with Greek text.  A sample .tex file in Greek
> and the typeset PDF would help.

XeLaTeX supports UTF-8 input of Greek text.  With a proper fontset, that
includes Greek characters, one can type directly into a XeLaTeX document
text in Greek.

Unfortunately, we don't have TeXlive in the ports, so that can't be
used in the doc/ tree.

Out other option is the {babel} package, but there's a catch there too.
With the current teTeX ports, one can use the {babel} package like this:

  \documentclass[12pt]{article}

  \usepackage[english,greek]{babel}         % Pull in both English and
                                            % Greek language support.
  \usepackage[iso-8859-7]{inputenc}         % Allow ISO 8859-7 input of
                                            % Greek text.

  \begin{document}

  \section{Εισαγωγή}

  Σήμερα είδα για πρώτη φορά Ελληνικό κείμενο δίπλα από
  \selectlanguage{english} English text \selectlanguage{greek}
  στο \LaTeX{}.

  \end{document}

Roughly translated to English, the text above would read:

  \section{Introduction}

  Today I saw, for the first time, Greek text side by side with
  \selectlanguage{english} English text \selectlanguage{greek}
  in \LaTeX{}.

The tricky part is that switching between languages for every English
term has to be done with a filter.  Otherwise, we will end up with the
odd result of typesetting English text with Greek fonts.

A good way to start making changes to support Greek would be to:

  * Make sure that jadetex adds the two preamble commands shown above:

      \usepackage[english,greek]{babel}
      \usepackage[iso-8859-7]{inputenc}

  * Find a way to 'filter' the text and replace non-command sequences of
    English text with `\selectlanguage{english} ... \selectlanguage{greek}'.

We can probably keep the bloat to a semi-reasonable size by also making
jadetex define short-hand aliases in the document preamble, like:

      \newcommand{GR}{\selectlanguage{greek}}
      \newcommand{EN}{\selectlanguage{english}}