Is there any suggested way how to cope with this?
Depending on what he wants to do with LaTeX-luatex, he might: 1. (The smartest) Use a solution like XeTeX's xu-hyphen package to wrap the pattern-loading routine into something that looks more like UTF-8 (I don't know how this is done exactly so I cannot be more precise). 2. (Quick and dirty) De-activate the troublesome hyphen files by either using a custom language.dat, or creating empty files to override the standard ones. In TeX Live 2007 The files in questions should be -rw-r--r-- 1 areutena promo8 0 sep 26 18:42 bghyphsi.tex -rw-r--r-- 1 areutena promo8 0 sep 26 18:43 gahyph.tex -rw-r--r-- 1 areutena promo8 0 sep 26 18:43 huhyphn.tex -rw-r--r-- 1 areutena promo8 0 sep 26 18:44 ruhyphen.tex -rw-r--r-- 1 areutena promo8 0 sep 26 18:44 srhyphc.tex -rw-r--r-- 1 areutena promo8 0 sep 26 18:44 trhyph.tex -rw-r--r-- 1 areutena promo8 0 sep 26 18:44 ukrhypmp.tex 3. (Even faster) If he's only interested in testing LuaTeX features, use plain LuaTeX. Arthur