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!).<br>
<ol><li>Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 6--6<br>[] \OT1/cmr/m/n/10 bio-graphy bio-graph-ical</li><li>Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 9--9<br>[] \OT1/cmr/m/n/10 bi-og-ra-phy bi-o-graph-i-cal<br>
</li></ol>The Oxford Colour Spelling Dictionary is not following the hyphenation points of the words on the 1996 tape we were sent.<br><br>Dominik<br><br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On 24 October 2010 09:45, John Was <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:john.was@ntlworld.com">john.was@ntlworld.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff">
<div><font face="Arial Unicode MS">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.)</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial Unicode MS"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial Unicode MS">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).</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial Unicode MS"></font> </div><font color="#888888">
<div><font face="Arial Unicode MS">John</font></div>
</font><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 0px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px;"><div class="im">
<div style="font: 10pt arial;">----- Original Message ----- </div>
<div style="font: 10pt arial; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(228, 228, 228);"><b>From:</b>
<a title="wujastyk@gmail.com" href="mailto:wujastyk@gmail.com" target="_blank">Dominik
Wujastyk</a> </div>
<div style="font: 10pt arial;"><b>To:</b> <a title="xetex@tug.org" href="mailto:xetex@tug.org" target="_blank">Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other
platforms</a> </div>
</div><div class="im"><div style="font: 10pt arial;"><b>Sent:</b> 23 October 2010 17:51</div>
<div style="font: 10pt arial;"><b>Subject:</b> Re: [XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in
a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly community</div>
<div><br></div></div><div><div></div><div class="h5">On 23 October 2010 16:20, John Was <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:john.was@ntlworld.com" target="_blank">john.was@ntlworld.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br><br>
<blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">[...]<br></blockquote>
<blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">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
<br></blockquote>
<blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">[...]<br></blockquote>
<div> </div>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. <br><br>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.<br><br>Dominik<br><br>
</div></div><p>
</p><hr><div class="im">
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