[tex-hyphen] Adding support for Hebrew (UNIV: XeTeX, NOT XeLaTeX; re-sent, no replies seen)

[Philip Taylor]

Trying to add support for Hebrew to this year's TeX Live (TeX Live 2016), as I find I have to do each time a new release comes out, I have, after much trial-and-error, succeeded in at least getting \language {hebrew} to be accepted without complaint.  However, looking at the incredibly voluminous output which results from "TLMGR GUI Actions: Rebuild all formats", after invoking "TLMGR generate language --rebuild-sys" from the command line, I noticed that there was something (several things, really) about my "hyph-he.tex" file that caused problems.  These seemed to consist of "non-letter" and "duplicate pattern" :

(c:/TeX/Live/texmf-local/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/hyph-he.tex
! Nonletter.
l.16 ן
       1
! Duplicate pattern.
l.28 ×°1
        
! Duplicate pattern.
l.30 ײ1
        
! Nonletter.
l.31 ײַ
        1
! Nonletter.
l.59 מּ
        1
))
 ) )

so I simply removed the offending lines from the file. But I have a number of questions :

1) Why do I have to use the TLMGR GUI to perform a "Rebuild all formats" when I have already used the command-line and requested "generate language --rebuild-sys" ?

2) Why are the diagnostics in crypto-speak and not in Unicode ?  I can make no sense of (e.g.,) "! Nonletter.  l.59 מּ" whatsoever, nor can I correlate it with line 59 of "hyph-he.tex"

3) Is it any way possible to suppress all the "non-error" messages in the TLMGR GUI transcript so that one can see the errors at a glance, or at the very least could all the errors be concatenated and appended ?

4) What is actually /wrong/ with my original "hyph-he.tex" (attached, as "hyph-he-bad.tex")

5) Why is Hebrew not natively supported by TeX Live ?  It is hardly a minority language.

I also note that other ?errors? in hyph-he.tex are preventing PdfTeX/eplain from being built :

> (c:/TeX/Live/texmf-local/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/hyph-he.tex
> ! Nonletter.
> l.2 ×
>      1
> ? 
> ! Emergency stop.
> l.2 ×
>      1
> No pages of output.

Why, I wonder, is PdfTeX/eplain even /trying/ to load a patterns file expressed in utf-8 ?  My loadhyph-he.tex, which should prevent this, also attached.

Philip Taylor
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