[tex-hyphen] use of middle dot as a separator

[Pander]

On 2012-12-19 18:18, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
>> I have seen in this document[1] that the middle dot character
>> (U+00B7) is proposed as a separator for indicating hyphenation
>> points (with the lowest priority).  This should be strongly
>> discouraged as this character is commonly used inside words in
>> Catalan and other languages.[2]
>>
>> [1] Hyphenation Definition File Format (under development), section 3.
>> Hyphenation priority
>> http://xml.resource.org/cgi-bin/xml2rfc-dev.cgi?mode=html&url=https://raw.github.com/PanderMusubi/hyphenation-definitions/master/hyphenation-definitions.xml#priority
>>
>> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct#Catalan
> 
> Thanks for this hint.  We will think about a solution.
> 
> Khaled writes:
> 
>   I think what you want is U+2027 HYPHENATION POINT.
> 
> Yes, this is a possibility.  However, having a document using both
> U+00B7 and U+2027 is calling for trouble.  I think a better solution
> is to have a kind of `header' to the word list which exactly specifies
> the used hyphenation category characters, providing defaults which can
> be easily overridden.  In German for example, the middle dot is just
> fine, however for Catalan, a different one has to be used instead.
> 
> 
>      Werner

I am actually in favour of using a character which is in the ASCII range
and is on everyone's keyboard such as ^ because it is easy to type and
cannot be confused with anything else.

We are talking about the lowest level of uncategorised hyphenation so it
well may be a character that stands out so it can be replaced quickly
with more useful hyphenation.