[tex-hyphen] german hyphenation patterns

[Stephan Hennig]

Mojca Miklavec schrieb:

>> 2. Add package german-x containing experimental patterns to TeX Live
>> 2008 and add them to language.dat.  (Roughly the following lines:
>>
>>  german-x-<date> dehypht-x-<date>.tex
>>  =german-x-latest
>>  ngerman-x-<date> dehyphn-x-<date>.tex
>>  =ngerman-x-latest
>>
>> where the exact value of <date> will be announced later.)
> 
> That's all fine, with one big "but", that but being: the same
> language.dat is being read by BOTH pdftex and xetex. So if you want to
> put dehyphn-x-<date>.tex into language.dat, the patterns REALLY need
> to be XeTeX-compatible, so you need to write a XeTeX wrapper
> xu-dehyphn-x-<date>.tex first if you want to do that.

I've already wondered what the xu- files are.  Actually, we're lacking
some genius that knows the weaving of patterns into TeX with all its
(new) variants inside-out.  To me, all this is quite new stuff.


> It sounds fine to me to use your patterns by default when XeTeX loads
> "normal" german patterns.

Does that simplify things?


> If you're providing additional packages for pdf(La)TeX, it's probably
> helpful for the user, and that doesn't concern the process of pattern
> conversion to utf-8. If someone writes a packages, go forward. XeTeX
> may load additional language that it's not really going to use.

The advantage of the hyphsubst package is that you can add updated
patterns later and switch back and forth between those while babel only
sees a request for language [n]german.  With XeTeX loading (tomorrow's)
experimental patterns by default, would this still be possible without
going the xu- file route?  (BTW, does the same apply to LuaTeX?)


> A summary: please, please, please ... do take a look at
> 
> 1.) svn://tug.org/texhyphen/trunk/tex/loadhyph/loadhyph-xx.tex (german
> is not the best example, take a look at "sl" instead; also the file
> will probably change - it's autogenerated anyway)
> and
> 2.) svn://tug.org/texhyphen/trunk/tex/patterns/utf8/lang-de-1996.tex
> for an example of what we would really like to see: plain patterns,
> utf-8 encoded, no catcodes, no lccodes, no TeX macros
> 
> With two languages that goal was unavoidable, and with languages such
> as german & french, I do not dare changing anything as it would break
> compatibility with OT1-encoded fonts.
> 
> The overall scheme, locations, comments ... all that might change, but
> the idea is to split content (patterns themselves) from intepretation
> (adapting them for xetex or pdftex that uses T1 or T2A encoding,
> depending on needs).

I think, I got the message.  More off-list.


> And for the sake of that, it would be really helpful to submit "clean"
> files. Definitely I can write a script to convert your patterns into
> the proper format, but I guess that you would want updates to happen
> automatically whenever you update your patterns,

The poor man that uses XeTeX with OpenType fonts for writing a thesis
doesn't really want a change of ngerman's hyphenation patterns to happen
automatically for it might change line breaking of the document.
Version control of evolving hyphenation patterns is what package
hyphsubst was written for.  How does this relate to XeTeX?

Best regards,
Stephan Hennig