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

Joseph Wright joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk
Sun Dec 8 14:58:05 CET 2019


On 08/12/2019 02:23, Doug McKenna wrote:
> 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 h!
>   yphenation 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.

No major reason: I modelled on the LaTeX kernel ones, which form a 
sentence ...

In the end, the key is that the log says something.

Joseph




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