Re: [Groff] .hw request and composite words in germanic languages

[Werner LEMBERG]

> We Swedes are very fond of creating new words by promiscuous
> concatenation. One (admittedly not so typical) example is
> 
>       'riksdagsmannautskottsstäderskevikariesbarnbarnsbyxor'

In German this is

        Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskajütentür

:-)

> Anyway, some times such words need to be hyphenated. E.g., the word
> 'tillåta' should be hyphenated 'till-låta'. The maintainer of the
> TeX Swedish hyphenation file claims that his patterns covers
> this. But suppose that I need to use '.hw' to give that pattern. I
> have tested, and troff understand do not that the pattern
> 
>       .hw till-lå-ta
> 
> should match the word 'tillåta'? What about
> 
>       .hw till?-låta
> 
> where the '?' would mean zero occurrences of the preceding character
> before hyphenation and one after. Would that be hard to implement?

This is on the TODO list since ever.  TeX has this mechanism also.
But it is not easy to implement -- hyphenation stuff is quite
complicated in GNU troff compared to other parts.


    Werner