NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/comp/text/tex/15379

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-24 | 1.8 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!math.fu-berlin.de!ira.uka.de!Germany.EU.net!sbsvax!sol.cs.uni-sb.de!bouillon
From: [e-mail] (Peter G. Bouillon)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Advanced hyphenation problem for (esp. German) compound words
Summary: How can I persuade TeX to consider certain hyphenations as
     possible but worse than other hyphenations?
Keywords: \hyphenation, compound words, German
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 24 Jan 93 18:28:16 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
Followup-To: poster
Lines: 28

German compound words can be hyphenated in several ways; however,
hyphenating their components is considered uglier than hyphenating in
between their components.  As, for example, the word `Gangschaltung'
has the components, `Gang' and `Schaltung', the hyphenation
`Gang-schaltung' is considered preferable to `Gangschal-tung'.
Similarly, words ending on `ion' can be hyphenated `i-on', but any
typesetter would avoid that wherever possible.

As however the German language is full of very long words, it is
unfortunately impossible to completely avoid ugly hyphenations in any
context.  Therefore, you can't really solve this problem by inserting
`\-' in all the preferable places.  For one thing, this would force you
to re-read your whole text after any alteration to the document
(style) to find out whether certain ugly hyphenations have to be
re-allowed in the new situation.

So I wonder how to convey to TeX that certain hyphenations have higher
badness than others.  Even if the border between components were marked
somehow (as a macro or something), you would still logically need to
use two hyphenation penalties.  There is only one in TeX, and it can
only be specified once per paragraph.

Does anyone have a workable solution?

(Please reply per email; I don't read this news group regularly.)

--
Peter G. Bouillon        [e-mail]