Re: an observation and proposal about hyphenation codes

[Dave Kemper]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 1:34 PM G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> At 2024-08-06T12:08:29-0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
> > This is the only line in your test file output before any .hcode
> > requests were run, so this shows the default hyphenation for the
> > system.
>
> Well, kind of.  The hyphenation language (`.hla`) and hyphenation mode
> (`.hy`) are the same for these two scenarios.

Yes, sloppy wording on my part.  By "default hyphenation" I meant no
aspect of it was changed by the input file.  Command-line switches of
course had an effect.

> Therefore these characters did not acquire nonzero hyphenation codes,
> and therefore were not valid hyphenation breakpoints.
>
> Does this make sense?

Yes.  It makes me wonder about the wisdom of commit 0629380a9's move
of the .hcode blocks.  That is, I understand the reasoning for it you
and Werner put forth, that the underlying groff design didn't
contemplate a single run needing different languages' hyphenation
support.  But tying an initial hyphenation scheme to a language seems
to at least tie it to the right thing at the outset, whereas tying it
to an encoding perhaps doesn't.

> If so, what I will do is make "en.tmac" `.mso latin1.tmac`.

That will solve the problem for English.  Are there other language
files that will need it?  Will some language files need other
tmac/latin*.tmac sourced?  Those are questions beyond my monolingual
knowledge.