May I edit hyphen-[project].tex?

Question

We are having a substantial list of hand-crafted hyphenation data, pulled into PTXPrint from an underlying PT-project via > Fonts+Scripts > Hyphenation > Import List...

I have found a file here, that seems to be a result of that import:

"D:\[path]\PT9\[project]\shared\ptxprint\hyphen-[project].tex"

This .tex file is encoded in UTF8 and I see only "normal" hyphens in form of U+002D. Now I would like to use a regex to reduce hyphenation-options which are "possible but ugly": 

I would shut down PTXPrint, make a backup-copy, apply my changes by removing certain hyphens, run PTXPrint again, and attempt to "Print" aka "Make PDF". Does this sound reasonable, or will I destroy the PTXPrint-project that way? If the latter, is there a better way to tune the hyphenation?

Note: I do not need help with the regex, thank you. The question here is only about the inner workings of PTXPrint.


TL/DR:
We consider the PT-project as the "source" for many possible publications, as demonstrated nicely on the PTXPrint online sample gallery. So inside Paratext we carefully manually maintain the hyphenation master-list, where we mark all legal options, even the not-very-pretty ones.

For the present publication we have a certain adult-readers target audience and we have a layout, page-size, font-size, which gives us "a little more freedom" and flexibility. So we can filter-out some of the allowed but not-ideal hyphenation-options. For example, I want to remove all options, which would leave only one character like a "orphan" on the end of a printed line and similar for trailing lonely characters.

Comments

A comment to give a quick update: As a deadline is getting close, I just went ahead and gave it a try, as described above.

I did not get any error-message or crash and I can see that the ugly one-letter-orphans at line-ends are gone. If there are negative side-effects, I have not found them yet.

Of course there is a penalty: I have to walk through the publication again, and re-tune the "Adjustments". But I knew that would happen, if I changed the hyphenation options. So far it is worth it, pages are looking better.

Answer 1

You can certainly do what you want to do safely. You probably will keep a backup of the file before you start messing. The worst that can happen is that you mess up your hyphenation and you can always disable using the file from within ptxprint.

In general, ptxprint is very data driven from the files in the configuration area, if you edit those files in some other way such that ptxprint is happy with the result, then that is a perfectly good way to make ptxprint do what you want it to do.