[tex-live] your eqexam package

taco taco at elvenkind.com
Fri Jul 9 22:43:52 CEST 2010


Hi,

Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
> 
> 
> cfrees at imapmail.org wrote:
> 
>> But if it is the preferred form for editing and 'source' is, in this
>> context, defined to be the preferred form for editing, then it is the
>> source in the relevant sense. Of course, if it is *not* the preferred
>> form for editing or if 'source' is defined differently, then it is not.
> 
> I think I can say with 99.9% confidence that it is not the
> preferred source for editing.

I'm willing to raise the confidence level by a couple of nines
on that. Editing patgen-generated files to fix hyphenation issues
is next to impossible, you really need the source word lists
(unless you have an full and correctly hyphenated vocabulary of your
language in your head and are able to juggle all the juxtapositions
of all the hyphenation points in them without making errors or omissions).

The problem is that for many (most?) pattern files, the
word lists that were used to generate them are commercial
intellectual property (e.g. of some dictionary publisher).
The fact that this is possible and accepted in any country
is mind-boggling, but nevertheless that is the actual
state of affairs.

I am not going to propose removing patterns without sources, but
it would be really nice if the source word lists for languages that
are indeed 'free' would be included on texlive, as they really are
the sources. The pattern files themselves absolutely are not.
In fact, I'd rather disassemble a binary program than try to
deduce a word list from a pattern file.

Best wishes,
Taco




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