Re: Text hyphenation

[address@hidden]

On Sep 28, 2011, at 4:33 PM, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

>> If i understood correctly ("user can type '--' in his file and than
>> search-and-replace it to '\-' "), that's anti-usability and
>> anti-userfrindliness at it's best.
> 
> Hehe.  No comment :-)
> 
>> I will keep repeating (sorry): better change lyric hyphen command
>> than use different commands for lyric hyphen and markup hyphenation.
>> I don't care that much about what the command actually will be -
>> both '--' and '\-' are quite fine to me (i could live with '=' too)
>> - as long as it's the same in both cases.
> 
> Ideally, this is configurable, both for lyrics and markup strings.
> Some people like `--' and `__', others like `\-' and `\_'.
> 
> No idea whether this is easy to implement (probably not, I guess).
> What says our brain specialist, Dr. med. David K.?
> 

I just want to reiterate something that I brought up a while ago and that seems 
even more relevant now.
It would be awesome if LilyPond had many of the functionalities of LaTeX, but 
it'd be a pity if we spent developer time implementing a host of LaTeX-like 
functionality from scratch when LaTeX already exists.

My question still stands: are there any libraries that exist that handle this 
sorta thing (i.e. is to typesetting text what pango is to font)?  And, if not, 
to what extent can TeX be used as a library itself, meaning fed input syntax 
and asked to output data that another program can use?

Cheers,
MS