We need to hack hyphenation for print draft please

Question

We have a well working setup and a long file hyphenatedWords.txt and I believe I have understood the system in PT8. We have entered all possible separations, to help PT8 to learn all the syllables and make better suggestions.

Now for print-draft, we have other needs: We need typographically nice pages.

• Plan A, let us tune it:

So I was looking for the Xetex options for tuning the hyphenation (we had assumed (always bad) that there are such options somewhere deep down). And inside the PrintDraft-mods.tex I discovered that there is a hack which is turning off [sic] most of the hyphenation magic and basically working from the hyphenatedWords.txt only. Q: Am I right with my last sentence?

• So now - as a plan B - I would like to just tune our hyphenatedWords.txt and this question is about that:

What happens if I temporarily re-name our normally well-working hyphenatedWords.txt to something else (for storing it) and I provide a new, tuned, hyphenatedWords.txt to PT8? I would do this while PT is not of course. Will it give us bad side-effects for translation, for interlinearizing, for back-translations, for management of key-terms? Or is PT8 keeping the hyphenation-info well separated from the other “functions”?

(Please do not ask how I would tune our hyphenatedWords.txt; it will involve some awesome regex and mass-murder of "="s and I would take full responsibility and will not get crazy ideas into people’s heads (just to the pros here in the forum). I will keep the original, promise.)

I have seen help texts and threads here about users even transporting and sharing those between projects; but I want to be double sure.

So in short: Can I keep two different hyphenatedWords.txt and swap them in and out of our project folder?

• Or if you do not like my plan B, back to plan A:

Or is there a way to learn and apply more hyphenation magic via PrintDraft-mods.tex? I am thinking about simple and obvious global overrides like:
\lefthyphenmin=3
\righthyphenmin=3

3 might sound like a lot to you, but we are using some word-initial apostrophes and combining-diacritics for our orthography, so depending on how the count gets done,

'í-

is an awefully short “residue” on a line of print.

Here you can see examples of hyphens we need as linguists, but which would be ugly in print:

Answer 1

The hyphenation data is only used for external publication (e.g. via Publishing Assistant) and for Print Draft inside Paratext. It is not used for anything else.

Thus you should be fine with swapping out the hyphenation data file. However, since it really has no other use, I might suggest you just change your hyphenation data to what is needed for publication purposes and maybe store what you currently have in the shared folder of your project so that data isn’t lost.

Comments

Just tried it, colleage was already waiting for good printouts: it is working very nicely. Thank you!!