[tex-hyphen] hyphenation different in xelatex?

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 11:17 AM, Claudio Beccari wrote:
>
> The behavior that Karl described while starting this thread is hardwired in
> the pattern files themselves; but what astonished me is discovering that
> dehypht.tex is still using special tricks to cope with TeX 2.0. Now,
> independently form the specific patterns, is there any reason to maintain
> any patch to cope with a piece of software that ha been superseded more than
> 25 years ago?

- no extra work to be done, just take that ancient file and don't try
to even start maintaining the files
- it works, so why bother
- the hope that we'll be able to "get rid" of those patterns in some
not too distant future

> Isn't much simpler to filter the pattern file for utf-8 aware
> programs through the utf8 to t1 encoding and have the same patterns (coded
> in a different way) for all engines?

No, it is not simpler. We would have to do extra work. Not that extra
work is a problem, but we would have to maintain five German pattern
files instead of three with super weird language code
(de-1901-x-legacytex?), and why would anyone working with XeTeX/LuaTeX
even want outdated/inferior patterns anyway?

Not touching the old German patterns was a somewhat deliberate
decision, hoping that we'll be able to switch to the new ones some
time soon.

Mojca