Re: Features needed for high-end DTP apps

[Gernot Jander <gernot tpg com au>]

Soeren Sandmann wrote:

> Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca pacaterie u-psud fr> writes:
>
> > yes.  If I remember right, german people have keep using a special macro
> > to get these words rightly hyphenated with TeX.  The TeXBook
>
> Yes, they use the primitive \discretionary like this:
>
>         ba\discretionary{ck}{k-}{k}en
>
> (Babel defines the shortcut "ck to do this).
>
> Speaking of hyphenation, one other thing that would be useful is
> recognizing compound words. German and other languages create new
> words by juxtaposing existing words, and it would be useful if the
> hyphenation algorithm could recognize this, so that the line-break
> algorithm could favor hyphenation at the compound point over
> hyphenation in the middle of one of the compounded words.
>
> Søren
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Correct hyphenation in german text automatically? Forget it., it wo'nt work.
I tried it using TeX and after defining thousands of
exceptions disabled this feature. It is easier to do hyphenation manually
than to correct wrong automatic hyphenations. If
you don't believe, read a german newspaper. You'll find dozends of wrong
hyphenations, even if the modern german grammar
is more relaxed about this.
If you want to develop a  reliable, good DTP for german text, don't promise
to much. The users will be disappointed.

Best regards
Gernot