hyph.XX: Hyphenation patterns

Description

Hyphenation patterns for hyphen() in several languages. Replace "XX" with "de", "de.old", "en", "es", "fr", "it", "en.us", or "ru", respectively. These data objects are not really intended to be used directly, but rather to be consulted by the hyphen() function without further user interaction.

Usage

hyph.XX

Arguments

Format

The pattern slot of each hyphenation pattern object has three colums:

orig: The original pattern in patgen style format.
char: Only the character elements of the pattern which can be matched to parts of an actual word.
nums: A code of digits defining the possibility to split syllables at respective places in this pattern.

Source

The patterns (as they are present in the "orig" column described above) were originally provided by the LaTeX developers[1], under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License[2]. Refer to Liang (1983) for a detailed explaination -- it's fascinating. From these original patterns the values in the remaining columns were created (using read.hyph.pat). Note: Some of the original patterns might have been altered before, too. This is because the use cases slightly differ between LaTeX and this package. For accurate hyphenation in text processing it's important to not split words in wrong ways, rather than identifying all possible split points. I therefore understand that in general these patterns might lead to slightly more conservative results. This package, however, uses the same algorithm to count syllables, that is, it's more important to just get the right sum of syllables in a word, and actually quite irrelevant (for the time being) which actual syllables were identified. That is, for this purpose even completely wrong suggestions wouldn't do any harm, as long as the overall number is correct, whereas perfectly valid hyphenations would be misleading if they are missing one or more possibilities. If any such changes to the patterns have been made, they are fully documented in the file "ChangeLog_hyph_patterns.txt" in the sources for this package. The unchanged original patterns can be found under [1].

References

Liang, F.M. (1983). Word Hy-phen-a-tion by Com-put-er. Dissertation, Stanford University, Dept. of Computer Science.

[1] http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/hyph-utf8/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/