Re: [Groff] german localization

[Werner LEMBERG]

> In the first moment I agreed, and we should even have a hyphen.00 with
> no hyphenation at all, where I am to insert every hyphenation by hand
> in order to quote old texts (e.g. Grimmelshausen) correctly.

Hyphenation can be completely turned off with the .nh request.

> Just this seems to be one more argument for multiple hyphenation
> files.

Hyphenation patterns (and exceptions) can be easily switched with
.hla, so you can have arbitrarily many patterns.

> So I have this problem: Is there really a case, where you have to
> cite texts after the old rules and a hyphenation.de-file could be of
> any use?  Hyphenation has always been made by the typesetter, not
> the author.  So either it is essential, so you have to insert it by
> hand, or it is not, and differs from edition to edition (even if all
> of them obey the same rules) - but in this case it doesn't matter
> and you could use the new rules as well.  When there is a colon or
> comma or not, that can make a real difference, but ba-cken
> vs. bak-ken?  Would you _really_ realize a new hyphenation as a
> violation of old texts?  And in cases where the old hyphenation
> matters, wouldn't you be a priori insert everything by hand?  When I
> cite an old text and want to make shure that the hyphenation is
> original, then I'm lost when the length of _my_ lines differ from
> the original ones.

The hyphenation patterns are meant as an aid.  For normal texts, more
than 95% are hyphenated correctly.  Unfortunately, German is a bit
special due to Haupt- and Nebentrennstellen (primary and secondary
hyphenation) which is not supported by TeX (and consequently not by
groff which has borrowed TeX's hyphenation algorithm).

Together with the \% escape to suppress/insert hyphenation points and
the (new) \: escape to insert zero-width breakpoints it should be
possible to get reasonable results.

Note that the hyphenation algorithm works suprisingly well even for
texts deviating from the `standard language' due to its pattern
nature; it might be worth to try old texts with German's traditional
patters also, fixing bugs where they occur.


    Werner