[tex-hyphen] german hyphenation patterns

[Stephan Hennig]

Karl Berry schrieb:
>      This shouldn't really matter as long as experimental
>      hyphenation patterns are installed in TeX Live 2008, by
> 
> What do the instructions look like for miktex?  Ordinarily, users don't
> have to do anything to enable the patterns at .fmt-dumping time.

For MiKTeX I'm discussing how to modify language.dat via GUI and
command-line.  GUI instructions for TeX Live are not really necessary,
it's just an extra level of comfort for the mouse-affine user.  (Well,
this is the kind of task that cannot be done comfortably in a GUI, but
they don't know.)

The command-line instructions essentially discuss

* how to locate or create a copy of language.dat in a local texmf tree,
* how to modify language.dat
   - Remove existing lines containing '=[n]german-x-latest'.
   - Add the four lines shown below.
* how to dump new format files.

I've hesitated to copy them here, since for obvious reasons all
documentation of the german-x package is in German only, except for a
small abstract.  Unfortunately, I didn't think about package maintainers
then.  If time permits, I'll add some more English instructions.


>       german-x-<date> dehypht-x-<date>.tex
>       =german-x-latest
>       ngerman-x-<date> dehyphn-x-<date>.tex
>       =ngerman-x-latest
> 
> Is the -latest really desirable for the generic names, instead of just
> german-x and ngerman-x?

Well, a time related term puts some more explicit documentation of the
writer's intentions into the sources: "Hey, take these patterns,
whatever their version might be.  Robust line breaking is no issue."
The names german-x or ngerman-x look pretty stable, don't they?  And
after all, all this stuff is still experimental.

Best regards,
Stephan Hennig