Re: neatroff for Russian. (Was: Questions concerning hyphenation patterns for non-Latin languages, e.g. Russian)

[Oliver Corff]

Hi Robin and Branden,

On 26/04/2023 15:16, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2023-04-26T15:16:55+0300, Robin Haberkorn wrote:
> > For future texts I therefore wanted to return to Groff (where we also
> > have the excellent MOM macros). Not being able to hyphenate UTF-8
> > Cyrillic text is a major limitation for me. I might get away with
> > converting it to KOI8 first, but could I still mix in Unicode
> > characters this way (as they are considered special characters by
> > Groff)?

I have similar needs as you in processing UTF-8 Cyrillic text (mostly
not Russian, though).

Mixing two different encodings in one document is generally not a very
feasible idea, and typically single-byte values may be displayed by a
single generic placeholder. Open, for instance, any KOI8-R encoded
document in an utf8-terminal; you either get something that looks like
two-letter combinations or question marks all over the KOI8-R part(s) of
the document. While a machine could, in theory, deal with such a matter,
it is simply a nuisance for a human editor/author to have to work with
such an input.

> Be sure you review my earlier messages to Oliver in detail.  The
> hyphenation code isn't "broken", it's simply limited to the C/C++ char
> type for character code points and hyphenation codes (which are not "the
> same thing as" character code points, but do correspond to them).

I am not familiar with modern incarnations of C/C++. Is there really no
char data type that is Unicode-compliant?

Best regards,

Oliver.


--

Dr. Oliver Corff
Wittelsbacherstr. 5A
10707 Berlin
GERMANY
Tel.: +49-30-85727260
mailto:oliver.corff@email.de