[tex-hyphen] Renaming plain pattern files in hyph-utf8: feedback?

[Claudio Beccari]

Once you proposed to use a suitable convert program to get suitable 
8-bit pattern files derivable from the utf8 ones used by xelatex. At 
that time you said that the team was lacking the necessary skills to 
create such a program.
Therefore  I accepted your statement and did not insist  nor did I 
support such an operation.

Two or three years ago Günter Milde, the new maintainer of the Greek 
support for babel, introduced the LICR and added to the basic support a 
little collection of packages that allow the Greeks, and anybody who 
uses Greek, to enter Greek text with Greek characters and/or with a 
Latin transliteration with special diacritic macros that allow to 
directly address the real glyphs in the LGR fonts. The existing 
gr*hyph5.tex files (where the * stands for a=ancient, m=monotonic, 
p=polytonic) were made many years before and could not manage the direct 
addressing of the upper half plane of the LGR encoding; without LICR 
access to the diacritically marked glyphs, such access was the result of 
a large set of ligatures that implied a glyph substitution between 
selected ASCII chars and upper half plane LGR chars.
The gr*hyp5.tex files had to be updated with the patterns containing the 
upper half plane glyphs; this is what I did about two years ago, and 
sent the new files for testing and correcting to Dimitrios Filippou, the 
author/maintainer of the version 5 ones. Since Dimitrios had very heavy 
duties and could not spend time in this operation, the new ones, with 
version number 6, are now finally in the hands of a new Greek TeX user 
who masters not only polytonic Greek but also ancient Greek; we have an 
agreement for a work flow of interaction between the new Greek TeXpert 
and me, so that eventually we succeed in uploading the new corrected and 
extended version when typesetting Greek text with 8-bit engines.
Another solution would be to derive 8-bit pattern files from the 
existing ones in utf8 encoding and omitting the ligature mechanism, but 
Latin transliteration would not work any more. Another would be to 
cancel Greek hyphenation for 8-bit engines and force people who need 
typesetting Greek texts to use XeLaTeX (and, if it worked in a simple 
way, also with LuaLaTeX, but this unfortunately is out of my and 
Apolstolo's reach). But the Greek who use the TeX system are mostly 
university people working in experimental sciences and do not want to 
give up the excellent support for mathematics for which pdfLaTeX is 
still superior (at leas in their eyes) to XeLaTeX. Therefore the 
situation should remain the actual one, with the upgrade to version 6 of 
the 8-bit LGR compliant pattern files.

Claudio


On 12/04/2016 12:12, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>> >and i do not see any means for getting
>> >rid of them and of the  8-bit LGR encoding.
> What did you mean by that?