RE: minor hyphenation issue

[Karl Berry]

    but the article doesn't explain exactly how the new patterns were
    developed, so there may have been some manual adaptation required.
    if karl doesn't know, then a query to the author would be in order.

I don't know. I last corresponded with Gerard (who was a super-nice guy)
in 2006. Not likely to still work, but FWIW, his email address then was
g dot d dot c dot kuiken at planet dot nl.

     if some patterns with non-ascii values are added, what might be the
     effect on a file that doesn't use \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Since patterns (except for luatex) are read at .fmt creation time, not
document time, it doesn't matter what a document loads or doesn't
load.

    I'm assuming that utf8 is the only sensible
    encoding to use now for extended patterns.

Documents are still being written (not to mention the millions that have
already been written) in Latin-N.

I do not know how the encoding of patterns vs. the engine vs. the
encoding of documents works out in practice. (With resulting bad
consequences, but that's the truth of it.)

I agree that adding exceptions for \"Oyster and the like seems a lot
simpler than doing anything with patterns. -k