[tex-hyphen] Customizing patterns

[Javier Bezos]

Hi Mojca:

Sorry for the late answer.

 > 1.) When there are local differences between countries, I see no
 > reason for not using the same strategy as Norwegians did. They have a
 > common file with "what holds for both variants of Norvegian" + two
[...]
 > add a new language. Germans did the same for Switzerland as well.
 >
 > We would name them es_ES, es_MX etc. (lowercase).

Actually, patterns depend on area -- those for Mexico
are good for most of Central America and part of
South America. IIR, Chile and Argentina are similar
to Spain, but... Canary Islands (in Spain) are very
likely those of Mexico. So things are not so simple
as Norwegian and German and the exact set of patterns
should be left to the user.

 > you would put 2no. into a separate file specialhyph-es-x-a.tex and
 > then loadhyph-es.tex would do
 >
 > \if\include{A}
 > \include specialhyph-es-x-a.tex
 > \fi
 >
 > instead of "spoiling" the original pattern file.

Ok. That means about 6 or 8 files, most of them required in
the default set. For example, the pattern for tl would
require 3 files: tl (no break, default), t-l and -tl.

If that's right for you, it's right for me, too :-).
(In fact, I discarded this solution because I thought
it could be a mess, but perhaps is the way t go.)

 > 3.) Is there any special reason (apart from local differences that
 > differ among countries) why you don't wan't to include ALL the
 > exceptions (that is - including chemistry, biology etc.) by default?

Patterns for chemical roots could conflict with general patterns,
and divisions which are natural for chemists could be odd for
non-chmists (and conversely). For example, chemists would divide
fenil-amina while non-chemists would divide feni-lamina -- both
possibilities are considered valid and correct.

 > I'm also asking since we are planning to convert the same set of
 > patterns into a form that would be suitable for javascript, apache,
 > perl etc. and there's usually no possibility to do such adaptions
 > outside of TeX world.

I don't mind creating a "safe" set, besides the TeX one.

Cheers
Javier