Re: Features needed for high-end DTP apps

[Damon Chaplin <damon kendo fsnet co uk>]

On Mon, 2002-10-21 at 12:01, Gernot Jander wrote:
> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > gtk-i18n-list mailing list
> > gtk-i18n-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-i18n-list
> 
> 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.

The TexBook seems to say that German words no longer change their
spelling. Is that true?

     "Before 1998, some ^{German} words changed their spelling
      when split between lines. For example, `backen' became `bak-ken'
      and `Bettuch' sometimes became `Bett-tuch'."

Maybe the best thing to do in German is just to have a dictionary of
specific words, i.e. no patterns.

Damon