(La)TeX adaption to the Nordic Languages

Plain TeX adaption

There exists a package to help people using plain TeX to typeset documents in the Nordic languages:

EuroTeX contains hyphenation patterns for various European languages as well as useful macros making it easy to choose different languages. The author is Ivar Aavatsmark (Ivar.Aavatsmark@nho.hydro.com).

LaTeX adaption

The standard LaTeX distribution contains the main support needed for typesetting in the Nordic languages:

an extended character set (the EC fonts using the T1 encoding), and
the Babel package for selecting languages.

In addition, you will need hyphenation patterns.

Hyphenation patterns

Patterns are known for the following Nordic languages:

Danish

dkhyphen.tex, dkcommon.tex and dkspecial.tex created by Frank Jensen (fj@iesd.auc.dk).

Finnish

created by Kauko Saarinen.

Icelandic

created by Jorgen Pind (jorgen@lexis.hi.is).

These patterns require Iplain, an Icelandic version of plain.

Norwegian

created by Lars Gunnar Thoresen and Dag F. Langmyhr (dag@ifi.uio.no).

There also exists an alternative set of patterns for hyphenating according to the pre-1973 rules; this was created by Ivar Aavatsmark (Ivar.Aavatsmark@nho.hydro.com). If you use these patterns, you should specify \lefthyphenmin=2.

No work has yet been done on hyphenation patterns for the `nynorsk' language.

Swedish

created by Jan Michael Rynning (jmr@nada.kth.se).

BibTeX adaption

To use BibTeX for documents in a Nordic language, you should use a BibTeX style adapted to that language; if not, you get words like and in the bibliography.

The following BibTeX styles for the Nordic languages are known to me:

Finnish

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho (gaia@iki.fi) has translated the plain style into Finnish; it is called finplain.bst.

Juha Haataj has created two Finnish bibliography styles:

cscalpha uses alphabetic citation keys.
finn is an author-year style. (It requires use of the natbib package.)

Norwegian

The four standard styles have been translated into Norwegian and are available as norabbrv, noralpha, norplain and norunsrt. These styles have been extended with fields isbn and issn.

Customize your own BibTeX style

Using the custom-bib program, it is easy to generate your own BibTeX style. The file custom-bib.zip is a ZIP file that contains the program and documentation.

Maintained by Dag Langmyhr.

If you hear of additional information for adapting (La)TeX to the Nordic languages, please let me know.

Last updated 2007/06/05.