RE: minor hyphenation issue

[Barbara Beeton]

thanks, werner,

    >> 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).

not a legal requirement that would hold up in court,
but a courtesy to knuth, which I suspect would be
backed by a large segment of the computer science
community, whose outcries in response to honeywell's
insistence regarding the naming of TeX were enough
to make Honeywell back off.

    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.

while a supplementary (or augmented) set of patterns
*will* have to wait until a new maintainer appears, there
will be no change in the knuthian patterns in my lifetime,
or (I predict) in knuth's.
                                                -- bb