[tex-hyphen] german hyphenation patterns

[Karl Berry]

felt like I should forward this to this list too ... there's a project
to create new patterns for German.

karl


Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 12:38:20 +0200
From: Georg Verweyen <verweyen at gmail.com>
To: Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>
CC: "Diskussionsliste DANTE e.V." <dante-ev at dante.de>,
   German Language TeX Users Group Communication List <TEX-D-L at LISTSERV.DFN.DE>

verweyen>     a good occasion to switch to the new patterns before TeX-Live 2008 is

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 ..

Ähh ... yes! The topic has been mentioned a couple of times on dctt and 
has been discussed in "Die TeXniche Komödie" without much of a reaction.

We are quite sure that the hyphenation is improved really significantly! 
Werner Lemberg found lots of (some hundred) wrong hyphenations with the 
old patterns. The new ones avoid all the known mistakes without changing 
the rest, so it should be way better now, even composed words -- you 
know the Donaudampfschiffahrtskapitänsmützen kind of words are hypenated 
correctly if they are part of the most used 500.000 words in german wich 
is quite a lot.

The changing of linebreaks should only occur to the better, but still we 
must consider running parallel for some time.

I'll send a carbon copy to TeX-D-L and the dante mailinglist.

Regards, Georg