Can another hyphenation dictionary be imported?

Question

For languages with long words, it seems the best way to handle wide spaces between words is to use hyphenation. (At least, I was not successful in getting the best results by adjusting the space between words. Perhaps I didn't use the optimum settings.)

Is it possible to import another hyphenation dictionary (e.g. hunspell) instead of using the hyphenation list from PTX?

Answer 1

PTXprint's user-interface / preprocessor is written assuming that you're working in a minority language where the PTX hyphenation list is all that's available. If you are working in a major language, (or someone on the team is familar with building patgen2 created dictionaries and getting them into TeX), then a solution is to use the built-in (or buildable-in) TeX patterns.
Different TeX builds often come with only a subset selected of what's available (to improve loading time/ avoid memory limitations on machines from the 1990s, etc) and you may need to do some configuring of the TeX installation, plus of course, if you're on Windows  I have no idea how stripped down what's included with PTXprint is.

Also... layouts and naming schemes for low-level things like this have changed since I was last modifying  language.dat manually, and I see you're not supposed to do that anymore, at least on this linux machine.

So... exact and appropriate help is tricky, but yes, if you are working in a language that has TeX hypenation support, while it might be a bit of a fiddle to enable it, it should be quite possible to use that, and since a fair number of the open-source hypenation engines trace their ancestry back to TeX and it's friend patgen (which makes the files that get read into iniTeX to build your tex instalation), you ought to be able to convert a dictionary if you have one.

Once you have a TeX installation that knows about the language, it should just be a case of adding
\uselanguage{esperanto} % or whatever

To your ptxprint-mods.tex file.

Beware... PTXprint uses XeTeX not XeLaTeX, luaTeX/laTeX/conTeXt or any other TeX flavours. A lot of the questions and answers you'll find on google for TeX-related searches are not going to be especially relevant. Being XeTeX, you need utf8 hyphenation patterns.

Comments

Thank you for this answer.

Answer 2

The way to use hunspell is to use it to insert soft hyphens (U+00AD SHY) into the text at the hyphenation opportunity points. This is a pain to do manually, but I do hope to code this up and add hunspell support to ptxprint.

Comments

Thank you. Any timeline for when this might be available?