[Groff] .hw request and composite words in germanic languages

[Sigfrid Lundberg, NetLab]

We Swedes are very fond of creating new words by promiscuous
concatenation. One (admittedly not so typical) example is

        'riksdagsmannautskottsstäderskevikariesbarnbarnsbyxor'

(which does not mean the same as 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' but
is about as meaningful.)

Anyway, some times such words need to be hyphenated. E.g., the word
'tillåta' should be hyphenated 'till-låta'. The maintainer of the TeX
Swedish hyphenation file claims that his patterns covers this. But suppose
that I need to use '.hw' to give that pattern. I have tested, and troff
understand do not that the pattern

        .hw till-lå-ta

should match the word 'tillåta'? What about

        .hw till?-låta

where the '?' would mean zero occurrences of the preceding character
before hyphenation and one after. Would that be hard to implement?


Sigge