[tex-hyphen] zerohyph.tex and hyph-utf8

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 9:31 PM, Stephan Hennig wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've had the desire to read (in Lua) a pattern file containing no patterns.
>
> There's a file
>
>   texmf-dist/tex/generic/hyphen/zerohyph.tex
>
> in TL2014 that contains an empty \pattern statement.  However, I'm
> reading patterns from files provided by the hyph-utf8 package, which
> contain bare text patterns.  That is, I need to refer to a completely
> empty file.  But I couldn't find one in hyph-utf8.  I've looked at the
> various null.* files in the textmf tree, but all of them contain text
> comments.  Is there any file in TeX that is guaranteed to be empty?

What exactly do you want to do?

Given how flexible the lua language is, I would be surprised if you
would *need* an empty file to solve whatever problem you are trying to
solve. (I agree with Reinhard here.)

In my opinion the file zerohyph.tex was a dirty hack to prevent
hyphenation for a particular language without having to modify the
code. If the lua code for loading hyphenation patterns as shipped by
hyph-utf8 (the part written by Manuel, Élie and Khaled) is not
flexible enough, we should fix *that*.

Mojca