RE: Another way of tweaking lout to support alien characters?

[Ted Harding]

On 03-Dec-98 Matìj Cepl wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From:        Valeriy E. Ushakov [SMTP:address@hidden
>> Sent:        Wednesday, December 02, 1998 8:41 PM
>> To:  Lout Mailing List
> 
>> In Lout characters (or to be precise, glyphs) are objects, and you can
>> combine arbitrary objects into new objects.  So the problem is not to
>> make new objects first class citizens (they already are) - the problem
>> is that little magic that happens with words behind the scenes when
>> they are transformed from (syntactic) words into objects.
>> 
>       [MCepl]  Oh well, you are true I am afraid. Ted, how would groff
> deal with hyphenation in the word containing your beatiful composite?
> 
>                       Matthew

This whole discussion about different character sets, glyphs, codes etc
has dropped me into deeper waters than -- in Lout -- I am used to
swimming in. I need to think about these issues for a while.

However, a quick response to the above.

Matthew asked how gtroff would deal with hyphenation for a specially
defined character (such as \(zv for <z-caron>). Hyphenation can be a
complex issue and there are several resources relevant to it, but the
short answer is that you can make its hyphenation equivalent to some other
"standard" character: the request

.hcode \(zv z

would have the effect that if "muzstvo" would have been hyphenated
muz-stvo, then "mu\(zvstvo" will be hyphenated mu\(zv-stvo. In any case,
if the worst comes to the worst, the "soft-hyphen" character "\%" will
always make that position available for hyphenation if layout suggests it:
"mu\(zv\%stvo".

Bye for now,
Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
Date: 03-Dec-98                                       Time: 15:48:20
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