[tex-hyphen] pTeX and Greek hyphenation patterns

[Mojca Miklavec]

(subject changed from "new upload to CTAN")

Dear Takayuki,

Thanks a lot for you answer.

2011/1/16 Takayuki YATO (ZR) wrote:
> Hello Mojca,
>
> --- Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Greek patterns depend on Greek language package being installed.
>> Should I desable Greek for a moment (and wait until somebody starts
>> complaining)? I see that there is an exact copy of ibycus patterns in
>> ptexgeneric.
>
> I think for the pattern entry "ancientgreek" the approach "if the engine
> is pTeX then load (unmodified) grahyph5.tex (as in other non-Unicode
> engines) will perfectly work. Do you mean there is some concern about
> this approach?

That approach is perfectly fine. But I have two (pretty important) questions.

1) dependencies; pTeX patterns used to be standalone, which means that
pTeX patterns would generate even without having greek and
ancientgreek package installed. Ibycus patterns are duplicated in
ptexgeneric. We either need a duplicate of gr*hyph5.tex in ptexgerenic
or pTeX needs a dependency on greek and ancientgreek (I need to check
exact names), or gr*hyph5.tex patterns need to be installed
unconditionally.

2) How do pTeX users input Greek (what encoding and what font do they
use)? (Can you please send an example of a minimal document with some
Greek text suitable for pTeX?)

> Among the "multilingual" pTeX users (ie. those who write languages
> other than English and Japanese on pTeX), the Greek language (in
> particular the ancient Greek) seems to me to have relatively
> high popularity. Indeed, to employ the ancientgreek pattern is not
> an easy task for general pLaTeX users, because Babel (and Ibycus)
> does not automatically choose the suitable pattern for the designated
> variant of Greek languages (while Polyglossia does).

When you speak about Polyglossia you probably mean that when one is
using XeTeX and Polyglossia then Greek hyphenation works out of the
box, while it doesn't work when using pdfTeX (or pTeX) and babel?

The problem is that XeTeX/Polyglossia uses proper Unicode characters
for Greek and hyphenation works properly with any given font. While in
pdfTeX/Babel (please correct me if I'm wrong) one uses ASCII and
depends on one particular TFM font with suitable ligatures. Everything
is pretty much an ugly hack, but it used to be the only way to make it
work before UTF-8 engines existed.

I faintly remember that pTeX knows some proper Greek encoding (also
based on the fact that it recognizes Tau). In that case it makes a
huge difference. If pTeX can use proper "Unicode" Greek input and
proper OTF/TTF fonts with Greek characters, then it makes much more
sense to use hyph-el-monoton.tex, hyph-el-polyton.tex, hyph-grc.tex
than gr*hyph5.tex. Babel and Polyglossia support is another issue of
course (neither is made to support pTeX, but that could be partially
changed).

Mojca