[bug #59397] Assign default .hcode values to alphabetic characters in groff's default character set

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #59397 (project groff):

I still have a lot to learn about hyphenation, so feel free to point me to the
manuals on this, but I think Bjarni may be mistaken.

The hyphenation patterns we use for English (tmac/hyphen.us, which should
probably be hyphen.en), since _language_, not _territory_, is the first-order
determinant of hyphenation break points) don't have any non-basic-Latin
letters in them.

Therefore, for the Latin-1 Supplement letters (or any others) to be treated
like their base characters from basic Latin, their hcodes will need to be set
as Dave advised.

I think if we do as Bjarni advises, there would be no effect.

So we probably want something like:

.hcode e ['e] e ['E]

...right?

Come to think of it I don't think the documentation is crystal clear here on
the ordering.  I think the odd-parity arguments are the
codes-that-already-exist when the elements of an argument pair are not
identical (establishing a new hyphenation code).

I'll have to dig into the source, or be clued in by the lurking Werner, to
figure this out, because I've already processed this part of the manual, and
if I can't answer this I don't think it's documented.

Finally I think it might be an open question as to whether letters from
outside the basic Latin alphabet _should_ necessarily be hyphenated like their
basic Latin "base characters".  And there remains the problem of what to do
when, say, the ae or oe ligatures, or the Icelandic eth and thorn letters show
up.  Let alone stuff from outside Latin-1 or Latin-9.

It is _words_, not letters, that get hyphenated, and that process occurs
within the context of a language, and...well, you _should_ be able to
temporarily change languages. You should be able to do it with a
correctly-sequenced set of .hla and .hpf requests.  But you'd probably want to
macrofy that.  Exceptions wouldn't get lost if the manual is correct when it
says "[h]yphenation exceptions specified with the 'hw' request are associated
with the current hyphenation language".

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