On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 9:31 PM, Stephan Hennig wrote: > Hi, > > I've had the desire to read (in Lua) a pattern file containing no patterns. > > There's a file > > texmf-dist/tex/generic/hyphen/zerohyph.tex > > in TL2014 that contains an empty \pattern statement. However, I'm > reading patterns from files provided by the hyph-utf8 package, which > contain bare text patterns. That is, I need to refer to a completely > empty file. But I couldn't find one in hyph-utf8. I've looked at the > various null.* files in the textmf tree, but all of them contain text > comments. Is there any file in TeX that is guaranteed to be empty?
What exactly do you want to do? Given how flexible the lua language is, I would be surprised if you would *need* an empty file to solve whatever problem you are trying to solve. (I agree with Reinhard here.) In my opinion the file zerohyph.tex was a dirty hack to prevent hyphenation for a particular language without having to modify the code. If the lua code for loading hyphenation patterns as shipped by hyph-utf8 (the part written by Manuel, Élie and Khaled) is not flexible enough, we should fix *that*. Mojca
