§1  Typesetting German Documents with Plain TEX  Introduction  1

1. Introduction.

There are several defencies of plain TEX if used for German documents:

— Mappings of national characters (‘umlauts’ and ‘sharp s’) to macros or to other character codes (if special fonts are available) are missing.

— TEX produces lots of overfull hboxes for German texts. That’s because the words there are usually longer than English ones. Furthermore we have to use much more hyphenation for German texts than for English ones, narrow typesetting is more important than few hyphenations. In particular, words with umlauts are not hyphenated often anyhow, even with the ‘multiple-word’ approach from .

— It is typographic usage that between compound words ligatures are not built. Plain TEX has no easy, readable way to provide this.

This file does the according definitions. They are quite often only a kludge. But it is hard to make the restrictions disappear, sometimes it is even impossible within the current implementation of TEX—and there will never be any other implementation. So we must live with these kludges.

2. Of course, there is more to German typesetting. Hyphenation, also for words with umlauts and sharp s, etc. This basic functionality is supplied by the babel system and DANTE’s , we have to load the appropriate module.

There’s one problem, though. babel 3.5 defines , a symbol used by to decide if it shall use NFSS code to access symbols. But that usage will lead to an endless recursion, because some text symbols are defined by themselves. I don’t know if that problem is caused by babel’s code or by its usage in – turning it off seems to be an appropriate fix.

3. But before we start we declare some shorthands for category codes. By declaring the at sign (‘ ’) as well as the underscore ‘( )’ as letters we can use them in our macros. (I agree with D. Knuth that is more readable than and in every case better than .) With the at sign we can use the “private” Plain macros and with the underscore we can make our own macros more readable. But as we have to restore these category codes at the end of this macro file we store their former values in control sequences. This method is better than to use a group because not all macros have to be defined global this way.

4. Let’s identify this macro file against the user and in the Log file.

§5  Typesetting German Documents with Plain TEX  National Characters  3

5. National Characters.

By default no extended characters are available, except those defined below. I.e., we start to treat all

characters from  to  as invalid characters.

6. We provide a command for the definition of non-ASCII characters: . A sample definition of an “Umlaut-a” (ä) in the extended code of an IBM PC (hex code ) is:

First the hex code is given as a control sequence, followed by a colon. Afterwards come two parameters, the first is again the hex code, the second is the token list which should be used instead of the hex code.

The macro definition is rather easy, we just have to make the respective character active and bind it to it’s new meaning.

7. Now we can define some replacements.

The braces after the control sequences are needed when characters from the extended character set are written to an auxiliary file and read in later. During the they are expanded and following white space would be gobbled if the braces would not be there.

§8  Typesetting German Documents with Plain TEX  Paragraph Breaking  4

8. Paragraph Breaking.

As outlined in the introduction, we allow longer interword spaces. A line now may have a badness up to 2500, over 1500 a warning is to be given. Furthermore the penalties for hyphenation are lowered because a narrow typesetting is preferred against few hyphenations.

These values are still experimental and should be tuned.

As uses babel compatible structure, the german language hook is a good place to store such definitions. But to use babel’s convenient macros, too, we have to assure that it’s kernel code is loaded first.

9. In some languages ligatures should not appear between compound words. We use \| to mark those places. This is only done within text mode, in math mode \| is still ‘∥’. But it is sure that one can always hyphenate between compound words, so we insert . To allow the hyphenation in other parts of the word though, we use again.

10. Don’t use the dreaded ‘double quote special meaning’ stuff of . And use original umlauts. Already in Münster I voted against it…

11. Define for upward compatibility. It does not really do the same, the old definition was more similar to . But other languages have to be declared explicitely, that’s not done by this macro file. So we just want to make old documents processable.

12. We are finished; switch to german language (to enable the new extras defined above), restore the catcodes and prevent from following garbage.

Typesetting German Documents with Plain T_{E}X

Section Page

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 National Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3 Paragraph Breaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4