[Trennmuster] Replacing the old hyphenation patterns with new ones

[Stephan Hennig]

Am 02.10.2012 15:54, schrieb Mojca Miklavec:

> The DANTE/NTG/ConTeXt/EuroTeX meeting is approaching.
> 
> Would it make sense to put the discussion about replacing the old
> patterns with the new ones (for pdfTeX) on Dante's meeting agenda?

Even though our patterns are likely superior to conventional patterns,
my personal opinion is:

  If at all, not yet.

Rationale:

  * There might be hidden license issues with the word list
    patterns are base upon.  Even though we are allowed to use
    the Mannheimer Liste
<URL:http://projekte.dante.de/Trennmuster/Korpora#Mannheimer_Liste>
    by agreement, that agreement may be illegal.  IIRC, I've seen
    on IDS web site a statement that no such agreements are
    possible because of third party copyrights.

    Possible solution: base our word list on Google Books Liste
<URL:http://projekte.dante.de/Trennmuster/Korpora#Google_Books_Liste>
    (derived from Google Books Corpus).

  * As Werner recently pointed out, patterns still generate a lot
    of obvious errors of the form xxx-y-zzz on words that are not
    part of the word list, while single letter syllables aren't
    possible in German.

  * Something I forgot ...

That doesn't address the question whether German pdfTeX patterns should
be touched at all.  Finally, it's all up to the Babel maintainers (which
I'm not).

Best regards,
Stephan Hennig