Re: [PATCH groff] tmac/hyphenex.en: add patterns for sequestrate & its derivates

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi onf,

At 2024-12-17T19:48:24+0100, onf wrote:
> On Tue Dec 17, 2024 at 7:00 PM CET, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Is that a standard English word?  "Sequester" is; sometimes used in
> > U.S. criminal procedure to refer to a process of isolating a jury
> > during its deliberations.  I think I've also seen it in fiscal
> > contexts.
> >
> > "sequester, sequestered, sequestering" would all be standard.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Hmm.  "sequestration" _does_ seem standard to me, though.
> 
> From Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, 6th ed.:
>   se-ques-trate (also se-ques-ter) verb
>    (law) to take control of sb's property or ASSETS until a debt has
>          been paid
>    -> se-ques-tra-tion noun
> 
> The word has gained another meaning since this book came out in the
> phrase "carbon sequestration", which britannica.com defines as
> "the long-term storage of carbon in plants, soils, geologic formations,
> and the ocean."

Yes, I'm familiar with that form of the word (as noted above) and this
application of it.  (Did you hear that the Siberian traps appear to be
roaring to life?[1]  Many of us under the age of 60 can look forward to
dying of heat stroke.)

> I am not sure about "sequestrated" and especially about
> "sequestrating",

I'm dubious about "sequestrate" itself, and therefore even more so of
these derived forms.  One or two other cases exist of UK English getting
carried away with reduplicative affixes on verbs, but I can't summon any
to mind right now.  More common is the pointless suffixing of "-al" to
"make" an adjective out of a word ending in "-ic" that _already is_ an
adjective, like "ironical".  UK English just loves this form of
morphologic excess.  I blame proximity to France.

But I digress...

> but I have added them anyway as they seem theoretically possiple and I
> didn't want to risk they wouldn't hyphenate correctly.

Then the thing to do is put appropriate `hw` requests in your troffrc
file, into the document, or into a file that your document sources.  GNU
troff's hyphenation exception files are not a good first location to
site hyphenations of nonstandard words.

> > If TeX doesn't handle this word, I'm inclined to advise that a
> > document do so itself with the `hw` request.
> 
> I dunno. I don't have TeX installed.

I do, but don't know enough TeX to write a counterpart to my "hyphen"
script for it without doing a lot of homework first.  Maybe someone else
here does.

> I have modified your script into the following to be in line with the
> way I set up hyphenation:
>   #!/bin/sh
>   printf '.mso %s.tmac\n.ll 1Z\n\\&%s\n' "$1" "$2" |

One _Z_?  What _is_ this unit?  And why isn't the formatter complaining
about it?

("What are you animals doing in my head?  Why is Private Pyle out of his
bunk after lights out?  Why is Private Pyle holding that weapon?  Why
aren't you stomping Private Pyle's guts out?")

I see I have more work to do on Savannah #64240.

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64240

>       nroff -ww -Wbreak |
>       sed -E '/^$/d' |

`-E` is, I think, unnecessary here, since `^` and `$` as zero-width
anchoring atoms are both valid POSIX BREs, not reserved to EREs.  FYI.

>       tr -d '\n' && echo
> 
> It hyphenates correctly, too:
>   se‐ques‐tra‐tion
> 
> However, I have a file where hyphentation is setup like this:
>   .mso en.tmac
>   .de HY
>   . hy 4
>   ..
> 
> (the macro HY is used after .nh to re-enable hyphenation.)

Seems reasonable.

> ...and the word "sequestration" simply does not hyphenate.

Hmm.  I can't reproduce this.

$ cat EXPERIMENTS/onf-hyphen.roff
.ll 10n
.na
.mso en.tmac
.de HY
.  hy 4
..
sequestration
sequestration
.nh
sequestration
sequestration
.HY
sequestration
sequestration
.pl \n[nl]u
$ nroff -ww -Wbreak EXPERIMENTS/onf-hyphen.roff
sequestra‐
tion se‐
questra‐
tion
sequestration
sequestration
sequestra‐
tion se‐
questra‐
tion

I get the same results with my working copy and with groff 1.23.0.

I even get the same results with groff 1.22.4, with this expected
additional diagnostic.

troff: EXPERIMENTS/onf-hyphen.roff:3: warning: can't find macro file 'en.tmac'

We didn't have "en.tmac" back then.

> But when I put:
>   .hw se-ques-tra-tion
> after the above requests at the top of the document, it does.
> 
> I have no idea what might cause this behavior. Running groff with
> -ww does not reveal anything hyphenation-related.

I think something might be misconfigured in your installation.  :(

What version of groff are you running?  (Down to the commit, if
necessary.  `groff --version` should disclose this information.)

I can try a build of that exact same commit, run it, and maybe we can
compare `pev` and/or `phw` request output.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/10/arctic-tundra-carbon-shift

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