[tex-hyphen] right/left hyphenmin

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 10:23 AM, Vladimir Volovich wrote:
> "HH" == Hans Hagen writes:
>
>  >> note that some pattern files also set \lefthyphenmin and
>  >> \righthyphenmin.
>
>  HH> i guess that this is done because of the constraints they were
>  HH> generated in;
>
> not necessarily. one could say that "good defaults" the hyphenmins are
> known for at least some languages, and thus e.g. ruhyphen stored them in
> the pattern files, and babel's behavior was such that it obeyed whatever
> hyphenmin values were set by pattern files, and it worked even when the
> *.ldf file did not contain the providehyphenmins command.

During my first experiments I have set righthyphenmin to 2 for
Slovenian inside the loader, but it gave me 3 at the end (judging from
how words were hyphenated). Jonathan Kew told me that it was because
the setting should have been global i.e. outside of \begingroup. But
then settings for Slovenian might influence English typesetting if
they were loaded last.

If anyone can explain me if/when/how the setting is needed, I can put
it to loadhyph-foo.tex. If it's not needed, I won't do it. But I would
not dare making that setting global.

Does it mean that setting lefthyphenmin to 4 before loading patterns
would keep it 4 even if user sets it to 1 again in his document?

Mojca