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

[Sigfrid Lundberg, NetLab]

On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

 ... Lots of laugh supressed ...

> > 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?
>
> This is on the TODO list since ever.  TeX has this mechanism also.
> But it is not easy to implement -- hyphenation stuff is quite
> complicated in GNU troff compared to other parts.

Ah. I'll try to read the TODO list before proposing 'novel' idead ;)

Sigge