[XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly community

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Here's what TeX does with "biography" and "biographical" (using
\showhyphens).  The first item is the result with British English
hyphenation patterns loaded.  The second is with the USA patterns loaded
(ugh!).

   1. Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 6--6
   [] \OT1/cmr/m/n/10 bio-graphy bio-graph-ical
   2. Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 9--9
   [] \OT1/cmr/m/n/10 bi-og-ra-phy bi-o-graph-i-cal

The Oxford Colour Spelling Dictionary is not following the hyphenation
points of the words on the 1996 tape we were sent.

Dominik


On 24 October 2010 09:45, John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com> wrote:

>  I'm afraid the hyphenation rot had set in well before 1996.  Any
> publisher that can list bio|graph|ic|al and biog|raphy in adjacent entries
> to its published dictionary of hyphenation points (The Oxford Colour
> Spelling Dictionary) clearly needs to be treated with caution on such
> matters!   (The second two in 'biographical' are marked as less preferable,
> and I used to dream of a system which would allow ranking of hyphenation
> points, though it's a pretty immense task; the solitary one in biography' is
> surely unacceptable.)
>
> The old conventions as delineated in the latest editions of Hart were much
> safer, allowing much less less leeway for inflexional breaks and for the
> 'feel' of how words are pronounced nowadays (or however they would like to
> express it) and sticking to a finite number of quite easily grasped rules
> that had essentially been in place since the inception of type and (in view
> of the prevalence of classical learning at that time) are recognizable
> adaptations of Latin/Greek rules (essentially: take over a single consonant,
> split a group of consonants, though it isn't that straightforward of
> course).
>
> John
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>
> *To:* Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms <xetex at tug.org>
> *Sent:* 23 October 2010 17:51
> *Subject:* Re: [XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly
> community
>
> On 23 October 2010 16:20, John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
>>
> Getting back to TeX-related matters, the hyphenation patterns available in
>> XeTeX (even to 'plain' users like myself) are an enormous help, even if I
>> disagree with the English at frequent points
>>
> [...]
>>
>
> Phil Taylor, Graham Toal, and I were involved in making the British English
> hyphenation patterns for TeX.  They were based on a really good tape of
> UK-English-hyphenated words supplied to me by OUP themselves in 1996 (with
> full permissions to release the results to the TeX community).  When you say
> you disagree with the English break points quite often, are you using the US
> or the UK patterns?  They're very, very different.
>
> It's hard to get good public info on British English hyphenation.  American
> dictionaries routinely include hyphenation points, but British one's
> routinely don't. The OUP tape was a godsend.
>
> Dominik
>
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