Hi! I asked a quite specific question in Tex Stack Exchange (see [1]) about Finnish hyphenation rules. The question and answer transitioned to more general talk about what would be good for Finnish hyphenation, in my opinion. This mailing list is probably better place for such talk so I'll continue here.
The current Finnish hyphenation rules in Tex implement Finnish (quite simple) hyphenation rules but in addition to that they try to address some problems in compound words. This doesn't work very well. To really hyphenate Finnish compound words there must a spelling checker which knows where the words are. So Tex Finnish hyphenation patterns fail most of the time with compounds. The current Tex system also causes unexpected hyphenation (as I described in [1]). Finnish people understand the basic rules well but Tex Finnish patterns has some magic that works sometimes against what we would expect about hyphenation. So, that being the case, in my opinion, Tex should not even try to do clever magic with Finnish compounds. The patterns should implement just the basic hyphenation or line-breaking rules. That would produce expected output and Finnish writer would know when a \- is needed between two words in a compound. The current Finnish patterns in Tex are quite old and established. I'm not sure if it is a good idea to change them. Many people probably have documents with hyphenation hints which are adjusted precisely for the current hyphenation patterns. So it would be great if there was some kind of easy to choose "basic" hyphenation variant for Finnish. That would just implement the basic rules without any magic. Unfortunately I don't understand Tex hyphenation technically and currently can't offer code patches. Anyway, the basic Finnish hyphenation and line-breaking rules are described in [2] and that is meant for humans, not computers. ----- [1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/535843/why-finnish-hyphenation-doesnt-work-correctly-with-words-starting-with-laus [2] http://www.kielitoimistonohjepankki.fi/haku/tavutus/ohje/153 -- /// Teemu Likonen - .-.. http://www.iki.fi/tlikonen/ // OpenPGP: 4E1055DC84E9DFF613D78557719D69D324539450
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