[tex-hyphen] ptex and language.def

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 06:22, Norbert Preining wrote:
>
>> Present one disables dehyph-exptl in platex and uplatex,
>> http://members2.jcom.home.ne.jp/wt1357ak/dehyph-exptl.zip
>> enables it also in platex and uplatex.
>
> Ok, but I would say we leave that to Mojca to decide.

dehyph-exptl is not mine. I asked the authors to do one of three
things for pTeX:
a) (at least) not load any patterns at all (but to make it recognize pTeX)
b) load patterns from hyph-utf8
c) provide their own pTeX-compatible patterns

If I remember approximately right they didn't want to spend more time
on (c) [they could easily also copy patterns from hyph-utf8] and they
didn't want to have an extra external dependency as in (b), so I was
perfectly happy for them to do at least (a).

Please note that the reason why 99% people use dehyph-exptl is to load
new German hyphenation patterns which *are already the default* in
pTeX anyway. (And even then I guess that most German users don't care
enough to switch to newer patterns.) It is only pdfTeX users who "have
to remain line-break backward compatible" that are still using those
very old files, so they need to load extra packages to get new ones.

One doesn't get any extra functionality at all by being able to use
dehyph-exptl in pTeX, except if one wants to use multiple versions of
hyphenation patterns in the same document or use some old patterns
after they are already removed from TeX Live, but that is extra manual
work anyway.

One could argue that existing new documents could work out of the box
on pTeX then, but any modern document loading dehyph-exptl is probably
written in UTF-8 anyway, so it would fail to work by definition.

> For now I have
> - changed language.ptx to .dat in texmf-dist/tex/platex/config/hyphen.cfg
> - remove texmf-dist/tex/ptexgeneric/config/ directory including
>  the language.ptx file.
> svn 26006.

Just curious about one more thing. Now the only difference between
original hyphen.cfg and the one in platex is:

\ifx\platexDUMP\@undefined\else
    \edef\platexBANNER{\the\toks8 }%
\fi%%

What exactly does this code do?

>> You can remove the word "ptexgeneric" in texmf.cnf, after
>> removing the directory ptexgeneric.
>
> There are still files there, namely in
>        texmf-dist/tex/ptexgeneric/hyphen/
> there are
>        grahyph5.tex  grmhyph5.tex  grphyph5.tex  ibyhyph.tex
> So I didn't do that for now.

They are not needed any more.

> If Mojca wants to make dehyph-exptl work with platex, she can
> include your changes or do something else.

The problem is that this is not my package. It's maintained by Werner
Lemberg and Stephan Hennig. By far the easiest change to make
dehyph-exptl work with pTeX would be simply loading
hyph-de-xxxx.ec.tex instead of nothing. But as already explained, that
wouldn't bring much benefit to pTeX users either.

> Mojca, I also assume that you know why there are these 4 files
> in the ptexgeneric/hyphen/ ...

As already explained, these are literal copies of four other files
with the same name. The reason why they are there is because platex
was loading Greek patterns unconditionally and it wasn't practical to
depend on hyphen-greek being installed as a prerequisite for pTeX.

Thank you very much for the change. I'll remove the remaining patterns
now. I can leave "negotiations" with Germans to Norbert ;)

Mojca