[luatex] Hyphenation in plain TeX

[Robin Fairbairns]

Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 10:21, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 05:03:55PM +0900, Vladimir Lomov wrote:
> >> Hi Mojca!
> >>
> >> > To hyphenate Russian, one would need to fix something in
> >> > luatex/lualatex formats first.
> >> Hm, could you explain a little what the problem is? With font encodings?
> >> After all, these languages are work fine in context (actually mkiv).
> >
> > The \uccode/\lccode is not set for anything but ASCII (or whatever TeX
> > engine internally have), XeTeX sets it for the entire Unicode charset
> > in the format, but we don't yet for LuaTeX, so any hyphenation requiring
> > characters outside ASCII will not work out of box (or at least this is
> > my understanding).
> 
> Just to give an example ...
> 
> In some loaders we have (the example is taken from Sanskrit):
> 
>     % Set \lccode for ZWNJ and ZWJ.
>     \lccode"200C="200C
>     \lccode"200D="200D
>     % Set \lccode for KANNADA SIGN JIHVAMULIYA and KANNADA SIGN UPADHMANIYA.
>     \lccode"0CF1="0CF1
>     \lccode"0CF2="0CF2
> 
> Alternatively you can also write characters instead of hexadecimal
> numbers. For example, for German you do need:
> 
> 	\lccode`ä=`ä
> 	\lccode`ö=`ö
> 	\lccode`ü=`ü
> 	\lccode`ß=`ß
> 	\lccode`Ä=`ä
> 	\lccode`Ö=`ö
> 	\lccode`Ü=`ü
> 
> but it probably still hyphenates somehow without those. If you want to
> hyphenate russian, you need to provide \lccode command for every
> letter of Russian alphabet, both for uppercase and lowercase letters
> (they need to point to lowercase).
> 
> This should be fixed in format one day though, but if you want to use
> it now, this is what you need to do ...

what should be fixed in the format?  lccode tables for all unicode
ranges covering alphabetic characters?  seems extreme: i would think it
more sensible to provide the tables in hyphenation files -- that way
there would be some chance that the tables were constributed by people
who know the language.

robin