This is the tentative documention for the beta version of the ogonek package by Janusz S. Bie\'n and Dirk H\"ubel . The work on it (and on the upgrade of PLHB.STY) will be resumed in October 1994. In particular, the package will be improved and simplified by using \DeclareTextCommand. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract This LaTeX2e package provides a command to typeset letters with the ogonek diacritic mark; they are used in Polish and Lithuanian. The command is named \k in accordance with the recommendation of the Technical Working Group on Multiple Language Coordination of the TeX Users Group. The principal purpose of the command is to provide the high quality ogonek with CM fonts, although for Polish the best results are obtained with the special Polish PL fonts; the command can be also used with DC fonts. Introduction The ogonek diacritic mark (\k ) is absent in the original Computer Modern font (\cite[CM]), probably because it was not needed for Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. The ogonek was included in the extended TeX layout agreed in 1990 at the TeX conference in Cork in Ireland and therefore often called simply the Cork layout; however, there was still no standard command to typeset it. This was remedied in 1992, when the TeX Users Group Technical Working Group on Multiple Language Coordination WG-92-03\footnote {The group was described in \cite{Council}} recommended a set of TeX conventions concerning languages (cf. \cite{Conv}). In particular, the command names were proposed for typesetting letters and accents introduced in the extended layout; the command \k was assigned to the ogonek and the name justified as the last letter of the word {\it ogonek}\footnote {Actually J\"org Knappen wrote in \cite{summary} that \k stands also for the first letter of the Scandinavian {kvist}. It can be viewed also as the first letter of the German word {Krummhaken}} In \cite{Conv} WG-92-3 proposed also a set of two-letter names for the language-switching macros. We use the two names from this list (but without the preceeding backslash) as the option names in our package: PL for Polish and LT for Lithuanian. The lack of a standard way to typeset ogonek with Computer Modern fonts and its predecessors (including AM, i.e. Almost Computern Modern fonts) was from the very beginning a very serious obstacle for high quality typesetting of Polish texts. Several various techniques were developed independently to circumvent this problem; in the present package we use the method developed at the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of the Warsaw University and used in LaTeX styles plfonts and plhb.\footnote {Thanks to the contribution of Piotr Filip Sawicki, the support of these styles is a standard feature of AUC TeX, a sophisticated (La)TeX environment for Emacs, since the release 9.0 of May 1994.} The primary problem was to find a CM character which bears sufficient ressemblance to ogonek. Several characters (including e.g. comma) were tried till 1988, when Jerzy Ryll suggested to use \lhook (left hook) symbol available in Plain TeX as a part of the \hookrightarrow ($\hookrightarrow$) symbol; this is the character '54 in math italics fonts. Ryll's idea was described in the note \cite{TeXline} and Janusz S. Bie\'n's pl.sty style using this technique was sent to the TeXline editor to be included in the Aston TeX archive; unfortunately, it seems that it never managed to get there. The idea was also presented in a paper written in Polish in 1988, which however appeared much later (\cite{ctt90}). The remaining problem was to achieve proper positioning of the left hook character with the appropriate letters for every fonts size and shape; as ogonek accompanies such different letters as a, A, e and E, this was not an easy task. At first it was done simply by hand, as in Janusz S. Bie\'n's plfonts.tex file loaded during the LaTeX format generation. The credit for solving this problem is due to Leszek Holenderski, who in 1989 created his plfonts.sty, which patched the standard LaTeX font switching mechanism with the code for adjusting the placing of ogonek. We use his code here without any substantial changes.\footnote {Bie\'n's notes say that he started to use Ryll's technique on 22nd June 1988 and created a version of Holenderski's style on 17th October 1999 (the version was called plhb.sty, where hb stands for {Holenderski's style as modified by Bie\'n} and pl stands both for Polish and the earlier pl style; it used a different input convention than the original Holenderski's style)} In the extended TeX layout used at present practically only in Norbert Schwarz's DC fonts (cf. \cite{DC1}, \cite{DC2}) but envisaged as the future TeX standard and therefore recommended for Latex2e users} the slots are assigned for both Polish letters with ogonek and the ogonek itself; typeseting all Polish letters and some Lithuanian ones causes therefore no problem and requires only referencing the appropriate characters; the remaining Lithuanian characters have to be typeset using by the composition of the appropriate chcaracters (the \accent primitive cannot be used for this purpose because it placed the accent {over} the letter). The primary problem with the extended TeX font layout was (at to some measure still is) its incompatibility with the standard CM layouts, which for many users makes the migration to the new layout prohibitively difficult. For many applications a good solution was a mixed layout, with the lower part (character codes from 0 to 127) fully compatible with CM fonts and the higher part more or less compatible with the Cork layout. We will call this layout {Cork-extended CM layout}\footnote {It seems to be little known that the layout should be coded in the TFM and PK files by means of the Metafont font_coding_scheme command; to the best of our knowledge, the only program which takes advantage of this fact is Eberhard Mattes' dvispell}. The PL fonts, developed by Bogus{\l}aw Jackowski and Marek Ry\'cko with some advice of a professional typographer Roman Tomaszewski and included in the MeX distribution\footnote{available e.g. from Comprehensive TeX Archive Network in the catalog tex-archive/languages/polish }, are a special case of Cork-like extended Computer Modern fonts --- in the higher part they contain Polish letters with ogonek placed in the same slots as in the Cork layout; however, they contain also the Polish double opening quote moved from its Cork position in the lower part to the higher part of the font. This layout can be called PL-extended CM fonts\footnote {At present (i.e. in all MeX releases including 1.5) a PL font have the font_coding_scheme identical with the CM font it is compatible with. For example, both plr10 and cmr10 have the coding scheme {TeX text}, pltt10 and cmtt10 {TeX typewriter text} etc. Dvispell users would appreciate very much if the PL fonts were distinguishable from CM fonts by the coding scheme field, which can be asigned such values as {PL-extended TeX text}, {PL-extended TeX typewriter text} etc.} The PL fonts provide the best quality for Polish texts; however, for those Lithuanian letters with ogonek which do not coincide with Polish ones it is necessary to use the same technique as for CM fonts. In consequence, for Lithuanian texts the use of DC fonts is probably an optimal solution. Usage As the fonts called by us the PL-extended CM fonts are not widely used, they do not have also a generally accepted symbol for their layout. Mariusz Olko in his preliminary version of polski package referes to them as OT1P, while W{\l}odzimierz Bzyl in his LaMeXe uses the OT4 symbol; both of them use also the U (undefined) encoding. In consequence the ogonek package accepts the following encoding options: OT1 (standard meaning) OT1P (PL fonts with Olko's package) OT4 (PL fonts with LaMeX2e and later versions of Olko's package) T1 (standard meaning) U (the current encoding checked dynamically) Omitting the encoding option is equivalent to U. The ogonek package accepts also language option: PL (only Polish letters with ogonek) LT (Lithuanian letters - which subsume the Polish ones - with ogonek) Omitting the language option allows to use any letter with ogonek. Hyphenation of words with ogonek accent The full and correct hyphenation of words with ogonek (and other Polish letters) is possible with DC and PL fonts; details to be written later. References \bibitem{Texline} Janusz S. Bie\'n. Polish Language and {\TeX}. TeXline 8, January 1989, p.~2. \bibitem{cttex90} Janusz S. Bie\'n. Co to jest {\TeX}. Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.mimuw.edu.pl in pub/users/jsbien/tex as cttex90.tar.Z or from LISTSERV@PLEARN.edu.pl as CTTEX90 PACKAGE. \bibitem{Cork} Michael J. Ferguson. Report on Multilingual Activities. TUGboat Vol. 11, No 4, November 1990, pp 514-516 \bibitem{Council} Michael J. Ferguson. The Technical Council. {\it TeX and TUG News} Vol. 1, No. 3, November 1992, pp 5--8. \bibitem{Conv} Yannis Haralambous. TeX Convention Concerning Languages. {\it TeX and TUG News} Vol. 1, No. 4, December 1992, pp 3--10. \bibitem{DC1} Yannis Haralambous. DC fonts --- questions and answers (I). {\it TeX and TUG News} Vol. 1, No. 4, December 1992, pp 15--17. \bibitem{DC1} Yannis Haralambous. DC fonts --- questions and answers (II). {\it TeX and TUG News} Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1993, pp 10--12. \bibitem{summary} J\"org Knappen. Summary on Polish (La)TeX. Info-TeX@SHSU.edu and TeX-Euro@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de, 20th Novemebr 1992. \bibitem{CM} Donald E. Knuth. Computer Modern Typefaces. 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