[tex-hyphen] [Trennmuster] gswiss in language.dat

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 9:57 AM, juergen.sp at t-online.de wrote:
>>> grep swiss `kpsewhich language.dat`
>>> swissgerman loadhyph-de-ch-1901.tex
>
>> OK, then all is well and
>
> Maybe I misunderstand something, but I understand this line displays the
> "traditional" Swiss German patterns (from hyphen-german), while I was
> looking for the Swiss German patterns from your experimental project, i.e.
> gswiss-x-latest. I thought these are different, just like german-x-latest is
> different from loadhyph-de-1901.tex.

The files loadhyph-de-1901.tex and loadhyph-de-1996.tex load the old
German patterns (by Norbert Schwarz, Bernd Raichle, ...), but only in
pdfTeX. In LuaTeX and XeTeX the same file loads patterns generated by
Werner Lemberg & others. I would like to change that and always load
the patterns by WL, but the Germans are sensitive about backward
compatibility/100%-reproducibility of their documents and WL & the
team still claim that the patterns are in "experimental" state (that
is: planned to keep changing in future), so neither the authors of the
old patterns nor the authors of the new ones felt comfortable changing
the default to new patterns.

The file loadhyph-de-ch-1901.tex loads the patterns created by WL
because no other Swiss German patterns exist anyway (or rather: never
existed which doesn't put any burden on the need to keep
backward-reproducibility).

By loading "gswiss-x-latest" or whatever you call it, you would only
gain anything if you would actually manually install the very latest
version of the patterns yourself and manually changed language.dat. By
having the latest version of dehyph-exptl installed as it is shipped
by TeX Live, you wouldn't gain anything at all by using
call-it-whatever-you-like-swiss-german other than the already
installed "swissgerman".

I'm not involved in polyglossia or Babel, but the author of Babel
recently decided to 100% outsource maintenance of language definition
files. So if you need special support for Swiss German, you might need
to write one yourself. The patterns should work though.

Mojca