[tex-live] patterns generation & editing (was: your eqexam package)

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi Taco,

First of all, I'd like to make clear I have no opinion on what is the source of
a pattern file, so the question below is no an argument in the "source"
discussion, but really pure curiosity.

Le 09/07/2010 22:43, taco a écrit :
> Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
>>
>> cfrees at imapmail.org wrote:
>>
>>> But if it is the preferred form for editing and 'source' is, in this
>>> context, defined to be the preferred form for editing, then it is the
>>> source in the relevant sense. Of course, if it is *not* the preferred
>>> form for editing or if 'source' is defined differently, then it is not.
>>
>> I think I can say with 99.9% confidence that it is not the
>> preferred source for editing.
> 
> I'm willing to raise the confidence level by a couple of nines
> on that. Editing patgen-generated files to fix hyphenation issues
> is next to impossible, you really need the source word lists
> (unless you have an full and correctly hyphenated vocabulary of your
> language in your head and are able to juggle all the juxtapositions
> of all the hyphenation points in them without making errors or omissions).
> 
I'm quite surprised to learn that. I know near to nothing about the process of
building pattern files, but, being French, I already had a look at hyph-fr.tex,
and noticed it is full of comments, and moreover the patterns are divided as
"phonetic" and "etymological". Here is an excerpt:

%-------------------%-----------------------%
% phonetic patterns % etymological patterns %
%-------------------%-----------------------%
%%a
.a4
'a4
.â4
'â4
ab2h % df-bg 1998/02/07 for abhorrer
                    .ab3réa
                    'ab3réa
ad2h % df-bg 1998/02/07 for adhèsion & co
                    a1è2dre
                    .ae3s4ch
                    'ae3s4ch
                    1alcool

It really give the impression the pattern list was edited by hand, sometimes
with the intention of fixing hyphenation for a particular word, which looks
quite contradictory to your remark.

Could it be that it depends very much on the language, and that French would be
a particularly regular language wrt hyphenation? Or am I misinterpreting the
presence of the comments?

Thanks in advance for your explanation,
Manuel.