[tex-hyphen] German hyphenation of "Methode"

[David Gardner]

On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 04:50:31PM +0200, Élie Roux wrote:
>  * having a \totalhyphenmin primitive that would set the minimal total
> characters of an hyphenated word
> 
> Is the first solution reasonable? If not, I think it might be worth
> asking for \totalhyphenmin in engines under development (LuaTeX, XeTeX),
> what do you think? LibreOffice has an option for it, and it seems
> reasonable, so I can't see why it would be refused. If you think it
> might help, I can report the request.
> 

I think it's a very reasonable suggestion. I guess it wasn't in TeX 
originally because patgen could handle this, language wide. 

A more nuanced approach (which might not be too much additional work):

\shorthyphenpenalty : A hyphenation penalty to apply for short words, 
	defaulting to something big but not impossible.
\shorthyphenlen    : length of a word to consider short.

I can see this being a useful approach - it doesn't hyphenate short words
normally, but it *can* if the alternative is really terrible (e.g. a small
column which would otherwise be an overfull box).

\shorthyphenlen would default to 1 so that existing documents are unaffected.

David