[tex-hyphen] UTF-8 hyphenation patterns for Spanish updated

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 3:14 PM, Javier Bezos wrote:
> Dear Mojca,
>
> Sorry for not contacting you before. I has been somewhat
> busy these days.
> Yes, I'm aware there is a new mechanism for the hyphenation
> patterns, but I'd like to support people having still old
> systems and who don't know how to install the new package,
> so that if the patterns are updated the only thing I must
> do is to say "replace eshyph.tex and rebould formats".

OK, that's a perfectly valid argument.

Though, honestly, I cannot imagine many people deliberatly wanting to
update patterns. I never knew where they were residing, I never knew
how they were working. I didn't even notice that they were disabled by
default for my language. It took me some two years or more of using
LaTeX before I figured out that I should probably be using babel in my
documents. And it took me about a year before I figured out that
patterns were disabled by default in ConTeXt. Only when I started
writing exceptions in close-to-final documents, I started suspecting
that something might be going wrong globally.

Those who want to use luatex or xetex, will probably have to install
the latest TeX Live or MikTeX anyway. And I wonder how many other
people on older systems really care about some newer version of
patterns.

I first wanted to say: once we have hyph-es.tex in place (my request
to update your homepage and other data in that file is still valid),
it's super-easy to auto-generate a stand-alone hyphenation files out
of that. But then I started thinking about the arguments given above,
and thinking about how many people would really try updating manually
from those files, I started changing my mind.

> The
> goal of the new version is to have both systems, the old and
> the new, kept easily syncronized, because now the patterns
> are exactly the same. Or put it in other words, what I want
> is to avoid duplicated efforts.
>
> I wrote that file, in fact, months ago, when David Kastrup
> requested to me a version of the Spanish patterns for LuaTeX.
> Shortly after sending it to him, I realized the same file could
> be used for both t1 and utf8 encodings, so I wrote it but didn't
> upload to CTAN, until now.

It's a pitty that you didn't send your idea to anyone before that :)

You are using an interesting idea to define patterns. What I like
about it is that you don't need to know all the characters in advance.
    \setchar ñ{^^f1}{^^d1}\relax
that could be even simplified to
    \setchar ñ{^^f1}\relax
is much more readable than our ugly macros.

> If new patters are added, of course
> I will update the corresponding to new system as well.
>
> Javier
> PS. I've just subscribed to tex-hyphen.

Great.

Mojca