[tex-hyphen] german hyphenation patterns

[David Antos]

Hello,

Petr, I'm not sure if the list accepts non-member posts, could you please
repost it?

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 06:12:19PM +0200, Petr Sojka wrote:
> -- when alphabet does not have more than 255 chars,
> opatgen's patterns are "isomorphic" to patgen's.
> 
> -- opatgen is necessary when one needs more than 255 chars,
> thus is not needed for German.

Absolutely correct. The patterns generated are the same (except a bug in
patgen in one character long patterns, which don't make sense in most cases
anyway).

Moreover, if you can use patgen, do so:
- patgen is significantly faster
- the data structures are tightly coupled with semantics, i.e., a set of
  terrible hacks
- it doesn't solve unicode, opatgen has its own routines to parse UTF8, at
  the time of writing, stable libraries were not available
- the design of opatgen is quite unsuitable for the purpose; I tried to
  make it really general which wasn't a good idea
- opatgen is not very well coded (neither is patgen, but is works better)

If you need more characters than patgen is capable of (which is definitly
not the case for German), try to compile opatgen with gcc-2.95.

Yours,
D.A.

-- 
The great tragedy of Science---the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis
by an ugly fact
-- Thomas Huxley