[luatex] Hyphenation in plain TeX

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Le 08/10/2010 16:44, Arthur Reutenauer a écrit :
>> I tried
>> \lefthyphenmin=1
>> \righthyphenmin=1
>> and also
>> \lefthyphenmin1
>> \righthyphenmin1
> 
>   Both versions are correct, and equivalent.
> 
>> and get the same hyphenation. Ans thanks for possible hyphenations :)
> 
>   Could you just say what this hyphenation is in your case?  It's
> possible some typographers would forbid hyphenation at "ail-le" because
> the 'e' is mute (in fact, I'm sure they do), so you would only get
> mé-daille.  That is, provided \lefthyphenmin is at most 2, of course.
> 
FWIW, pdftex gives mé-daille, even with \(left|right)hyphenmin1.

I have no personal opinion on whether mé-dail-le is correct, but as a general
rule, I think the goal of the patterns is to avoid false positives (ie, don't
find wrong hyphenation points) be it at the cost of a few false negatives (ie,
not always finding all legal hyphenation points). This could be an explanation.
(Or, as you say, picky typographers dislike ail-le.)

Manuel.