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Message-ID:  <9604040800.AA15112@alea.univ-lille1.fr>
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              <LATEX-L@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
In-Reply-To:  Your message of "Wed, 03 Apr 1996 11:50:12 -0000."
              <9604031050.AA26966@r8h.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date:         Thu, 4 Apr 1996 09:59:59 +0200
From: Daniel FLIPO <Daniel.Flipo@UNIV-LILLE1.FR>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: Changing \hyphenchar
Status: R

First I would like to thank David for his clear presentation of the issue.

What Bernard and I feared, was that the next LaTeX2e release (june 96) would
set \hyphenchar='177 for (nearly) all T1-encoded fonts (just as the fd files
distributed with the present dc fonts do).

If a hook can be added, by the way of a .cfg file for instance, to enable
format builders to choose between the two settings (\hyphenchar not defined,
or \hyphenchar='177), that would be great (for French at least).
A question remains: which one will be the default? As you can imagine,
Frenchies would vote for \hyphenchar being not defined in T1 (as in OT1), but
it's up to the LaTeX3 team to see what is best for most languages.

Now, if a format setting \hyphenchar='177 has to be used with French,
as David wrote, as compromise has to be found, and I can think of something
acceptable (IMHO anyway):
1) We can add a set of hyphenation patterns for French to cope with '-':
   I have prepared a list of 111 patterns (=+10% of the present list of
   patterns for French) which seems to do a reasonable job;
2) << Educated French writers >>, I mean people who really care about exact
   hyphenation (how many are they apart from Bernard, myself, and a handful
   of others? ;-), can always type ``anarcho\-syndicaliste'' if they want
   this word to be hyphenated *only* after the `-'; it is a standard and easy
   way to achieve the hyphenation you want in TeX, and it will work with
   \hyphenchar defined or not.

Btw, could anyone tell me what languages require \hyphenchar='177;
mainly, I'd like to know what is the correct setting for English and German.

=============================================================================
Daniel Flipo                             E-mail : Daniel.Flipo@univ-lille1.fr
UFR de Mathématiques -- Bâtiment M2         Tel : (33) 20 43 67 75
Université des Sciences et Technologies     Fax : (33) 20 43 67 74
F-59655 Villeneuve d'Ascq Cedex
France
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