[tex-hyphen] multiple patterns files

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2013-07-29 at 14:52:46 +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

 > (Sorry for the totally off-topic reply)
 > 
 > On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

 > > What is this 8-bit of which you speak?  I have heard tell of
 > > such, in the ancient tales.

 > We had optic fibers installed at our home today. The machine which was
 > used to do the measurements stored the data to a 3.5" floppy drive. I
 > was amazed, but apparently this machinery was used by the army years
 > ago and does the job a lot better than the latest and a lot more
 > expensive equipment.

But a floppy is much less reliable than a USB stick in the long term.
 
 > I still tend to believe that the 8 bits from the ancient tales (which
 > is probably what 90% are still using) work better in many
 > circumstances than the 64-bit latest-and-greatest software from some.

Most people use 8-bit engines because these are described in the
literature.  It also took some time until people switched from LaTeX
2.09 to LaTeX 2e because they already had old books.  And you will be
amazed how many people will switch to ConTeXt once they find a ConTeXt
manual in a book store.

Though most people don't write multilingual documents, it's possible
with 8-bit engines.  In the VnTeX manual I described how to typeset
Russian and Vietnamese with Babel and LaTeX's utf8 input encoding.
It's not very difficult.  But it was extremely nasty to provide the
source code because I had to change the font encoding within a
verbatim environmemt.  This is definitely no fun.  With an engine
which supports UTF-8 natively it's possible to simply paste the code
into a verbatim environment.

Regarding fonts, users of 8-bit engines usually can use a particular
font only if someone else did the hard work already.  With OTF they
don't depend on others.  On the other hand, I can't deny that I
recently recognized how easy it is to fix kerning pairs in a Type 1
font if the fontinst sources are available.  That would be more
difficult with OTF.

After all, Dominik is using Sanskrit fonts and most non-latin fonts
are provided as OTF or TTF.  Both formats have built-in encoding
vectors which support more than 256 glyphs.  Since we have LuaTeX and
XeTeX I don't see any reason to care about 8-bit engines any more.

Mojca, Unicode is the future.  Don't look backwards, at least if
compatibility with existing stuff isn't required.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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