Dear FOP developers, As you know, hyphenation files are not distributed with FOP for licencing reasons (https://fop-dev.markmail.org/search/?q=lppl#query:lppl+page:1+mid:oov35g53cjfk4vcm+state:results ). I guess everybody agree that it would be good to have at least some of these files licenced in a way that is appropriate for including them back in the FOP trunk. Am I correct?
As a first attempt towards that goal, I have targeted the french hyphenation file (https://svn.lal.in2p3.fr/LCG/QWG/External/offo-hyphenation-fop-1.0/licenses.html#fr ). The file frhyph.tex mentions that it is “available for free and can used and redistributed asis for free. Modified versions should have another name.” So the only remaining problem was with the author of french.lh (http://jeffreykingston.id.au/) as he had not given specific licencing information, and the file french.lh is part of Lout, under GPL. I just contacted him and he wrote to me that he modified only the first part of the file (the rest as we know is what became the frhyph.tex file), and that he is ready to place his modifications into the public domain (here is the exact quote: “File french.lh was not really made by me. There is a small amount of trivial stuff at the top that I added, but when you get down to line 63 it is just a TeX hyphenation file written by someone else. So that makes the license not my business, I believe. The first 62 lines were made by me and I hereby place them into the public domain.”) I assume there would be some paper work and possibly a required check that that author really has the copyright (and not, for example, the company producing Lout)? But I thought I’d better contact you before pursuing with this endeavor. Please tell me if you would agree to integrate some of these hyphenation files back in the main FOP software, assuming the licencing issues can be solved; and if so, tell me what I should ask this author or whether you want to contact him directly. If this works, I consider also working towards including English and Spanish files, so that FOP would have hyphenation for three popular languages working out of the box and with non restrictive licencing.
