Dear Julian,
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 10:07:02PM +0100, Artur R. Czechowski wrote:
> > I'm not a TeXpert so I've asked people from GUST (Polish Tex Users Group)
> > about platex and I received information that platex by default gave a results
> > typografically conforming to polish standards (paragraph indenting, dots betwen
> > number and title in \*section{}, etc...)
This is not quite the truth (which I can probably judge being a co-author
of PLaTeX).
On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 01:22:32PM +0000, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> It would probably be better for everyone if the PLaTeX changes were to
> be incorporated into a package, so that one could run LaTeX on the
> following document and get the same result as one would from PLaTeX:
Things already are this way.
PLaTeX is in fact a bunch of files that includes a package named
polski.sty and font definition files for Polish adaptation of Computer
Modern.
PLaTeX includes as well configuration file named hyphen.cfg for those who
don't want to install/use Babel in the format file but want to include
some set of hyphenation patterns in the format. I believe my hyphen.cfg
gives format which is Standard LaTeX (contrary to that of the Babel
bundle, see babel/2790 `Is Babel legal?' in the LaTeX bugs database).
But this is of no practical importance for teTeX in Debian since you can
process documents with \usepackage{babel} with a format generated with my
configuration file and documents with \usepackage{polski} with a
bablified-LaTeX format. So nothing really wrong would happen if my
hyphen.cfg and platex _format_ were removed.
On the other hand this has some importance for the TeXlive distribution.
As you well know, it's impossible to compile all the hyphenation patterns
we have available today into a single format file---they wouldn't fit.
And since TeXlive is to be runnable from CD it has to include pregenerated
format files for several languages. So by convention platex.fmt contains
English and Polish patterns, cslatex.fmt English and Czech and so on (at
least I think this works that way).
With many thanks for Debian TeX distribution which is the best
out-of-the-box TeX I know,
Marcin
