14 Multilingual LATEX

The original versions of TEX and LATEX 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 that forbid doing anything explicitly. In Europe, LATEX 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 it has become the standard for the German-speaking TEX Users Group (DANTE). It contains some facilities for other languages, including French ...

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