[tex-hyphen] german hyphenation patterns

Stephan Hennig mailing_list at arcor.de
Mon Jun 9 21:17:57 CEST 2008


Karl Berry schrieb:

> karl> It's not a decision to make lightly.  Will the new patterns be
>> compatible with the old ones?  Will they be ready within a week or two
>> (at most)?  Is DANTE (Volker, Klaus, etc.) and the rest of the large
>> German TeX community aware of this effort?
>>
>> I admit to my gut reaction being that this is exactly the *wrong* time to
>> switch to a whole new set of patterns for such a widely-used language.
>> Mongolian is one thing.  German, quite another.
>>
>> Also, presumably the only reason to make a new set of patterns is to
>> improve the hyphenations.  That will inevitably change line breaks in
>> existing documents.  I wonder if the German TeXers would rather have
>> both old and new patterns available simultaneously, rather than making a
>> replacement.  It all bears discussion ..

An update from the German hyphenation pattern team: experimental German
hyphenation patterns are provided as two packages.

1. Heiko Oberdiek has kindly contributed a new package hyphsubst (part
of the oberdiek bundle), that hooks into TeX's language handling and
provides means to replace hyphenation patterns bound to a language.
This package should be on its way to CTAN, currently.

2. Experimental patterns are packaged as a simple zip archive containing
pattern files for traditional and reformed orthography together with a
short manual and a README.  These files are nearly completed, two items
remain to be done:

  a. I've recently found two small bugs in the patterns that I'd
     like to see fixed.  This should be a matter of hours.

  b. The README file contains installation instructions for the
     patterns only for MiKTeX, since that is what is running on
     my machine.  I've already asked for TeX Live installation
     instructions on dante-ev list, but without much response.
     This shouldn't really matter as long as experimental
     hyphenation patterns are installed in TeX Live 2008, by
     default.  But it seems a bit odd to me, that the patterns
     are prepared for inclusion into TeX Live, but don't provide
     installation instruction for that distribution. :)

If item b is not fixed by, say Wednesday, we'll upload the patterns to
CTAN anyway (as package german-x).  For TeX Live 2008 we'd like to see
the following thing to happen magically:

1. Update the oberdiek bundle to contain the new package hyphsubst.

2. Add package german-x containing experimental patterns to TeX Live
2008 and add them to language.dat.  (Roughly the following lines:

  german-x-<date> dehypht-x-<date>.tex
  =german-x-latest
  ngerman-x-<date> dehyphn-x-<date>.tex
  =ngerman-x-latest

where the exact value of <date> will be announced later.)

3. Do UTF-8 conversion of the experimental patterns for whatever your
reasons are.  (I'm not yet acquainted with XeTeX and LuaTeX. :/ )

Is that OK for you?

Best regards,
Stephan Hennig



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