[texhax] TeX hyphenation -- why do so many words get no hyphens

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Wed Aug 4 22:55:07 CEST 2004


    Is it really the case that TeX does not hyphenate these words?

I recognize a number of those as ones where TeX is known to miss the
hyphenation points, so I think the answer is yes, it's really the case.
Barbara Beeton has made collections of TeX hyphenation exceptions since
the beginning.

(We added a few of the most common exceptions in the recent update of
the TUGboat macros. :)

    I think the algorithm needs another step -- if the word is long enough
    try harder to hyphenate.  
    Possibly this could be done by adding more patterns, at a lower level

Additional patterns have already been written.  What are the results
with ushyph2.tex or ushyphen.max?  (I haven't used them, myself.)

The problem is always finding the good hyphens without allowing bad
hyphens -- much worse to include a bad hyphenation point than to miss a
good one.

    At http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2004-August/002484.html
    it simply says: Skipped content of type multipart/alternative
    ...
    Ideally the mailing list archives would handle this better -- I
    believe that one of the formats in the original message is plain text.

Indeed.  I'll look into it.  Unfortunately it seems to be in the mailman
code, not just a list configuration setting.

Thanks,
k



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