Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: XEP for $80

[jaccoud@petrobras.com.br]

The original TEX Portuguese hyphenation file is too primitive for serious
use. It doesn't even allow diacritics, which is not only abundant in
Portuguese, but affect hyphenation. (That seems also to be the case with
Czech.)

I wrote a better Portuguese hyphenation file to use in FOP (should be
shipping with 0.25), but it would not work in XEP because in it the
hyphenation points cannot be prioritized as they can in TEX and FOP
(http://www.renderx.com/Tests/doc/fo/spec.pdf - section 5.4)
In fact, since the whole idea of Liang's algorithm is based on this, I
can't understand how such a simplified algorithm could perform well, unless
it discards most of the valid hyphenation points. Have you tested XEP's
hyphenation algorithm with a bunch of hard-to-hyphenate words? (For
example, several words with tricky combinations of consonants and vowels
around ? ).

Nevertheless, "quite well" is a very subjective term. For some friends,
TEX's old file (which doesn't hyphenate any words with diacritics but
mostly works otherwise) is suitable. I had an extra job for being too
purist in orthographic matters, but with XEP I couldn't even start, since
we cannot correct or change its algorithm.

Marcelo






                                                                                                                        
                      Jirka Kosek                                                                                       
                      <jirka@kosek.cz>         Para:     jaccoud@petrobras.com.br                                       
                                               cc:       docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org                              
                      16/10/2002 09:01         Assunto:  Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: XEP for $80                                  
                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                        




jaccoud@petrobras.com.br wrote:

> To us it is useless: English writers can pass without hyphenation, but
> Portuguese ones can't, and their hyphenation algorithm simply doesn't
work.
> We would need to insert all hyphens as sot hyphens with an intermediary
> transformation on the FO file. With the FOP classes <grin/> Not worth...

Did you provided Portuguese hyphenation patterns to XEP? I did so for
Czech and XEP hyphenation works quite well.

I think that you can get PT hyphenation patterns from TeX distribution
and use it directly with XEP (this way it worked for Czech).

                                                             Jirka

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  Jirka Kosek
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