[tex-hyphen] hyphenating overview

Barbara Beeton bnb at ams.org
Sat Jun 9 16:09:20 CEST 2018


thanks for the information on ushyphex and ushyphmax, Arthur.

> > While the failure to update more recently is surely an oversight (and
> > I have on my to-do list the task of updating the cumulative TeX list,
> > getting it processed with hypenex and posted to CTAN), the word
> > "over-view" has been on the list since 2005, so I can't explain why it
> > apparently isn't in effect if the ushyphex collection is compiled into
> > the version of (La)TeX that you're using.

>  The list from ushyphex.tex isn’t used at all.  I’m surprised you
> weren’t aware of that.  The list of patterns referred to as ushyphmax in
> language.dat is Gerard Kuiken’s extension of hyphen.tex with extra
> *patterns* but actually no new hyphenation exceptions.  I don’t know if
> Dr. Kuiken had a specific reason to not extend his file with the
> hyphenation exceptions from ushyphex; possibly because exceptions do not
> actually need to be dumped into the format and can thus be loaded at
> runtime.

at the time it was compiled, the kuiken enhancement of the
patterns was actually based on the then-current exception list.
(somewhere in my archives I believe I still have the relevant
correspondence.)  but you're correct -- it's old.

>  That was, at least, the situation as we found it ten years ago when we
> took over the technical side of hyphenation patterns with Mojca.
> Obviously we didn’t want to change the actual patterns and exceptions
> without someone explicitly instructing us to do so; and for most major
> languages, it turned out, the patterns were essentially abandoned with
> no one maintaining them (again, contentwise); two exceptions are German
> and Spanish, handled in two different ways in hyph-utf8.

of course this is a reasonable decision.  maybe someone can
be found to investigate this so an update can be considered.
(I'll think hard about it, and get in touch with you off-list if
I come up with anything that seems promising.)  in the
meantime, I'll also reread the intro text for the exception list
to see whether it adequately deals with how to use what's
already offered to improve results.
						-- bb





More information about the tex-hyphen mailing list