Re: Text hyphenation

[Werner LEMBERG]

> It would be awesome if LilyPond had many of the functionalities of
> LaTeX, but it'd be a pity if we spent developer time implementing a
> host of LaTeX-like functionality from scratch when LaTeX already
> exists.

Well, we don't want to imitate LaTeX, but naturally the same problem
appears, namely how to enter special characters conveniently.
Theoretically, none of the proposed commands are necessary since for
all of them you could use Unicode characters:

  \"  U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE (ZWSP)

  \|  U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER (ZWNJ)

  \~  U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER (ZWJ)
      + U+0020 SPACE
      + U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER

> My question still stands: are there any libraries that exist that
> handle this sorta thing (i.e. is to typesetting text what pango is
> to font)?

I think we should concentrate on using Pango, which also comes with
layout support (probably rather simple, I don't know).  If
improvements are necessary, we should ask the Pango team to provide
it.

For hyphenation, there exists the libhyphen library (used e.g. in
OpenOffice).

luatex also allows paragraph building using its programmable lua
interface, but any dependency on TeX-like software means dependency on
TeXLive or an equivalent TeX distribution...


    Werner