[tex-live] patterns generation & editing

[Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd)]

cfrees at imapmail.org wrote:

> Looking at a couple of files was really what prompted my earlier
> comments. I don't know anything about doing this. The file for Welsh,
> for example, doesn't have the sorts of comments you see in the French
> file but the commentary at the top seems to assume that people would
> edit the file directly. For example:
> % This file is part of hyph-utf8 package and resulted from
> % semi-manual conversions of hyphenation patterns into UTF-8 in June
> % 2008.
> %%
> % Source: cyhyph.tex ()
> % Author: Yannis Haralambous
> %% The above mentioned file should become obsolete, % and the author of
> the original file should preferaby modify this file instead.
> etc. etc.

I think it is possible that the person who did the UTF-8 conversion
was simply not au fait with the normal Patgen process, otherwise
I think that he or she would not have spoken about "modifying"
this file but rather "re-generating" this file.  In my experience
(I took over the responsibility for the UK resources at Dominik's request),
generating a "patterns" file is a time-consuming task requiring
multiple runs of Patgen (the latter may even need enlarging for
large word lists), and I for one would not even /consider/ editing
the resulting "patterns" file with the sole exception of the list
of exceptions at the end.  And, for what I hope are obvious
reasons, not even that part should be edited once the patterns
have been distributed and archived.

** Phil.