[tex-hyphen] Help with UTF-8 Language

[Philip Taylor]

Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> No, the patterns should work just fine with a large alphabet.

This part I do not understand, Mojca; surely the patterns /define/ the
size of the alphabet, do they not ?  If letter <xqqyn> is not in the
patterns, then TeX cannot hyphenate a word containing letter <xqqyn>,
can it ?

> 2.) The fact that "patgen" is limited, "opatgen" is defunct and
> nobody else stepped up yet to create a new tool in some modern
> programming language with built-in Unicode support (or with some
> modern C(++) libraries) has nothing to do with XeTeX's ability to
> interpret patterns. If we don't have a tool that can generate
> patterns for large alphabets that doesn't mean that XeTeX cannot
> handle such patterns.

It was, in part, the existence or otherwise of such a tool that
interested me, as well as whether XeTeX could natively handle such
patterns were they to be generatable ...  A /very/ quick look at
Patgen.web suggests (to me) that a re-implementation in Perl might be
the fastest way forward (Patgen is run so infrequently that the run-time
overheads of an interpreted language are irrelevant) but I regret I have
too much on my plate at the moment to volunteer to investigate further.

> The patterns can probably be created with patgen with some ugly 
> tweaking (as Jonathan suggested).

That is indeed seriously ugly.  The sooner the whole of the TeX suite
has native UTF-8 clones, the more chance there is of TeX surviving into
the 22nd century, it seems to me.

** Phil.