[tex-hyphen] Missing line ends in language announcement messages

[Doug McKenna]

All the Unicode hyphenation pattern files for various languages announce themselves using a \message{} command when executed during the building of a TeX format file.  Users never see these announcements in any log file or the terminal, because users generally don't (re)build the format files.

For example, the UTF-8 hyphenation file at

  ./texmf-dist/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/loadhyph/loadhyph-af.tex

contains the line:

  \message{UTF-8 Afrikaans hyphenation patterns}

The same is true for many dozens of other similar such files in that same TDS sub-directory.

According to The TeXbook (obscurely stated on or about p. 228, top), consecutively executed \message{} commands accumulate text on the same line, with a space inserted between each argument string and the next.  The log file has other output that occurs between otherwise consecutive \message{} commands.  The terminal, however, doesn't receive those additional lines.

This means that one's terminal receives the following single line of text when an uninitialized TeX engine reads in, e.g., "latex.ini":

dehyph-exptl: using a TeX engine with native UTF-8 support. German Hyphenation Patterns (Traditional Orthography) `dehypht-x' 2017-03-31 (WL)
dehyph-exptl: using a TeX engine with native UTF-8 support. German Hyphenation Patterns (Reformed Orthography, 2006) `dehyphn-x' 2017-03-31 (WL)
UTF-8 Afrikaans hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Hyphenation patterns for Ancient Greek Greek hyphenation patterns for Ibycus encoding, v3.0 UTF-8 Armenian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Basque hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Belarusian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Bulgarian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Catalan hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Hyphenation patterns for unaccented pinyin syllables (CJK 4.8.0) UTF-8 Church Slavonic hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Coptic hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Croatian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Czech hyphenation patterns (Pavel Sevecek, v3, 1995) UTF-8 Danish hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Dutch hyphenation patterns ASCII Hyphenation patterns for British English ASCII Hyphenation patterns for American English UTF-8 Esperanto hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Estonian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Pan-Ethiopic hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Finnish hyphenation patterns UTF-8 French hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Friulan hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Galician hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Georgian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 German hyphenation patterns (traditional orthography)
... [etc.]

The \message{} commands are presumably there to create a readable record, but needless to say this is not much fun to read.

Is there a reason these \message{} announcements are not terminated with (or preceded by) some kind of line end character?


Doug McKenna
Mathemaesthetics, Inc.