felt like I should forward this to this list too ... there's a project to create new patterns for German.
karl Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 12:38:20 +0200 From: Georg Verweyen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Karl Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CC: "Diskussionsliste DANTE e.V." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, German Language TeX Users Group Communication List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> verweyen> a good occasion to switch to the new patterns before TeX-Live 2008 is karl> It's not a decision to make lightly. Will the new patterns be > compatible with the old ones? Will they be ready within a week or two > (at most)? Is DANTE (Volker, Klaus, etc.) and the rest of the large > German TeX community aware of this effort? > > I admit to my gut reaction being that this is exactly the *wrong* time to > switch to a whole new set of patterns for such a widely-used language. > Mongolian is one thing. German, quite another. > > Also, presumably the only reason to make a new set of patterns is to > improve the hyphenations. That will inevitably change line breaks in > existing documents. I wonder if the German TeXers would rather have > both old and new patterns available simultaneously, rather than making a > replacement. It all bears discussion .. Ähh ... yes! The topic has been mentioned a couple of times on dctt and has been discussed in "Die TeXniche Komödie" without much of a reaction. We are quite sure that the hyphenation is improved really significantly! Werner Lemberg found lots of (some hundred) wrong hyphenations with the old patterns. The new ones avoid all the known mistakes without changing the rest, so it should be way better now, even composed words -- you know the Donaudampfschiffahrtskapitänsmützen kind of words are hypenated correctly if they are part of the most used 500.000 words in german wich is quite a lot. The changing of linebreaks should only occur to the better, but still we must consider running parallel for some time. I'll send a carbon copy to TeX-D-L and the dante mailinglist. Regards, Georg
