It seems to be impossible to use the eplain format (from exlive-formatsextra) in portable way. Reason: it's missing (some of) etex's language selection features. E.g. for selecting the German hyphenation patterns I'd like to use \uselanguage{ngerman} or at least \language=\lang@ngerman The first macro isn't defined in the eplain format, neither the controlsequence \lang@ngerman So I'm stuck with looking at /var/lib/texmf/web2c/pdftex/eplain.log finding out the NUMBER of the ngerman patterns and using \language=NUMBER Truely not portable. Reproducible: Always
This will probably turn out to be more of a feature request for the upstream project. Assigning to tex team, who can forward the request or suggest where you could post one yourself.
(In reply to comment #0) > Truely not portable. I agree, but have you tried asking on tex-related mailing lists as I suggested in my mail ? This sounds more like the normal and wanted behavior for eplain to me :/
(In reply to comment #2) > (In reply to comment #0) > > Truely not portable. > > I agree, but have you tried asking on tex-related mailing lists as I suggested > in my mail ? This sounds more like the normal and wanted behavior for eplain to > me :/ closing as upstream, this seems the normal behavior; please reopen if there is anything to fix