On Thu, 13 Jun 2002 01:05:42 +0100 (WEST)
 Laurent Siebenmann <sieben@cristal.math.u-psud.fr> wrote:

> Vladimir says that this approach works "more-or-less" with
> stacked Russian and English.  What are its worst faults?  This
> system is *in use* so users should be warned early and often
> of any significant failings.

some issues with hyphenation mentioned in my previous email are due to
the fact that english and russian have different righthyphenmin values:
3 for english and 2 for russian. if we use a combined russian-english
patterns, we have to use some setting like 2 for righthyphenmin (minimal
number of letters which are allowed to be cut off the end of the hyphenated
word). the ruhyphen package provides some mechanism to make that work
in such a way that english words will be hyphenated with 3 letter limit,
but that works mostly, but not 100% equivalent to the case when the languages
are separated (and language-switching markup commands are used).

also, there are some typographical issues (russian has frenchspacing and
some special typesetting of :;?! signs, etc). so in general it is better
to use language switching commands, so that typographical features of
all languages will be activated at their full volume (if you don't switch
languages, the typographical rules are shared for all languages).

Best,
v.