Hello Barbara,
> The hyphenation exception list in TUGboat has been accumulating more
> and more words used in chemistry and similar fields -- pharmacology,
> medicine, etc. [...]
>
> German is heavily compounded, and the hyphenation patterns there
> seem to cope well with the situation, although I have no idea how
> that is accomplished.
I think the reason for the good behaviour (but certainly not perfect)
with German hyphenation patterns is twofold.
(1) German tends to hyphenate words as done in the original language;
While recent developments in the German orthography support
different hyphenation schemes – based on sound rather than on
etymology – the TeX patterns for German are rather conservative
and follow the etymology almost always.
(2) The word list on which the German hyphenation patterns are based
on contains quite a few words from the natural sciences (often
tagged in the comments with 'chem.', 'biol.', 'phys.', etc.); due
to Liang's algorithm this helps in hyphenating words that are
similar in structure.
Have a look at our repository:
https://repo.or.cz/wortliste.git
The main file is
https://repo.or.cz/wortliste.git/blob/HEAD:/wortliste
Its format is explained in
https://repo.or.cz/wortliste.git/blob/HEAD:/dokumente/README.wortliste
(German only, sorry).
Hyphenated lists of chemical and pharmacological substances can be
found at
https://repo.or.cz/wortliste.git/blob/HEAD:/zusatzlisten/arzneiwirkstoffnamen
https://repo.or.cz/wortliste.git/blob/HEAD:/zusatzlisten/arzneiwirkstoffnamen-supplement
(note that we don't use these two lists yet for the German hyphenation
patterns).
Werner
