Re: Hyphenation of german words and em-dashes in german texts.

["Uwe Koloska" <uwe.koloska@mailbox.tu-dresden.de>]

Hello,

You wrote on Dienstag, 20. Februar 2001 20:16:
>Hi!
>
>I've got two questions:
>1. I've written a file that contains the hyphenations of some words I
> often use and which TeX seems not to know how to hyphen.
>     All works wonderful until one of the words contains an Umlaut as in
>         \hyphenation{Prä-sen-ta-tion}
>   It doesn't work with \hyphenation{Pr\"a-sen-ta-tion} either.
>   Is there a way around this problem?

Yes (I think)!  You have to use a font that contains real umlauts. The 
normal TeX ones (cmr family) has no umlauts and therefore context 
constructs the umlauts from different glyphs (the mentioned 
\dohandleaccent).  TeX is not able to hyphenate words with constructed 
umlauts -- this was the main reason for introducing the T1 Font encoding.

So you have two alternatives
  \setupbodyfont[aer]  % leaves the construction to postscript / pdf
  \setupbodyfont[pos]  % uses postscript fonts (that have umlauts)

Possibly you have to switch to an encoding that knows of umlauts, so that 
you can type them directly.
For Win and Unix use
  \useencoding[win]    % enables (nearly) latin-1 for input

>2. In the TeXBook I've read that an em-dash is to be used in a sentence
>like "Every land I've ever visited has its own god --- or its own set of
>gods --- and they all have different names" From the moment I've read this
>thing about em-dashes in the TeXBook, I began to really discover them in
>english texts but never in german ones. Is this a special rule that is
>valid only for english texts or is it also a rule for german texts. And
>have I then, up to now, read only badly typsetted german texts? :)

No, it's not used in german and most modern english texts doesn't use it, 
too.  So in german you use "--" as "Gedankenstrich"

Uwe

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