Re: minor hyphenation issue

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> I believe that the tex patterns cannot be augmented with non-ascii
>> letters.  that is not to say that a *second* list, say
>> ushyphex8.tex, couldn't be created for use by the "extended"
>> versions of tex that accommodate the larger set of letters.
> 
> Perhaps herein lies the solution I seek.  Maybe the English
> hyphenation patterns could be kept in a master list that includes all
> letters, including non-ASCII ones, that appear in English words; then
> this list could be filtered before being fed to classic TeX, so that
> it sees only the all-ASCII entries?  If the entries appear one per
> line, a single grep command could do this preprocessing.  What do you
> think?

Your suggestion makes sense *for new US english patterns*.  The
existing patterns from Knuth must not be changed for legal reasons (or
some sort of that).

For groff you can do the following.

  1. Set up all latin-1 characters for hyphenation (using the `.hcode'
     request, cf. file `de.tmac').

  2. Add all words with non-ASCII characters to an additional
     hyphenation exception list and load it (cf. file `hyphenex.us').

On a global level, unfortunately, nothing will happen until a new
maintainer for US english hyphenation patterns appears.


    Werner