[tex-live] patterns generation & editing

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> 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).
>
> I'm quite surprised to learn that. I know near to nothing about the
> process of building pattern files, but, being French, I already had
> a look at hyph-fr.tex, and noticed it is full of comments, and
> moreover the patterns are divided as "phonetic" and "etymological".
> [...]
> 
> Could it be that it depends very much on the language, and that
> French would be a particularly regular language wrt hyphenation?  Or
> am I misinterpreting the presence of the comments?

Patterns for Romanic languages, AFAIK, can be manually maintained.
You should rather have a look at languages like German: Adding, say,
hundred compound words changes virtually the complete pattern set.


    Werner