Subject: Re: How should irregular hyphenation be represented?

From: [email-masked] (Alain LaBont(e'))
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 1995 20:06:24 +0500

Olle says:

>Indications of "recommended hyphenation behavior" in a text is a
>very useful thing if the text is to be displayed in a window or
>printed in a column with another width than the original (or in
>a font with other metrics than the original). These examples
>show that in general hyphenation can't be represented in _plain
>text_, i.e.  only by the possibilities provided by a coded
>character set. That hyphenation can be represented in the
>English language by means of the ugly hack SOFT HYPHEN is only a
>happy coincidence.

in my opinion, not all languages are so irregular. An example is French,
which is the example that confirms the rule (this language being in general
more complex than the average for most things, not on this): only 3 rules
are re necessary to do hyphenation correctly in French and it si fully
algorithmic.

You believ we have no problems: newspapers here (in Quebec and French
Canada) have bought in general American packages which look in dictionaries
to do hyphenation: they never were able to adapt those pieces of software so
that they could hyphenate new words correctly in French: the softwares are
so complex and badly written that they can get rid of the dictionary toll booth.

Please in internationalization do not imbed hyphenation functions in data
nor in generic software. Use standard software hooks or demons...

This is my only recommendation on this.

Alain LaBont<e'>
Qu<e'>bec