Re: ConTeXt german hyphenation

[Tobias Burnus <burnus@gmx.de>]

Hallo Peter,

> when hyphenating german texts, context seems to fail on words containing
> the umlauts (äöü). With LaTeX, hyphenation works. Somehow this reminds
> me of oldtime TeX (I know, accented letters do introduce explicit kerns,
> and TeX never hyphenates at an explicit kern, but after all I type an
> eight-bit character and also an eight-bit character is typeset, I
> thought).
>
> With LaTeX, TeX says  Al-ten-pfle-gesch[]ule-rin-nen, which is much
> better, it misses only two possible breaks. As I guess that ConTeXt uses
> the same hyphenation table as LaTeX does, this is quite astonishing to
> me.
(Hans, Taco, correct me if I say nonsense!)

I think TeX doesn't always hyphenate correct in LaTeX, when the hyphenation is
allowed in words containing accentuated characters (such as ü = diphthong + u)
and now two different philosophies become appearent: LaTeX says: better to be
mostly correct, finetuning is possible anyway. ConTeXt: Better not hyphenating
than wrong hyphenation, so the user will correctly reply to a overfull box. -- I
think both ideas are valid. In order to use ä as a letter and not as a accent
placed on a letter you need a font, which contains this letter. This can be a
virtual font (as ae, which maps ä to CM's "a) or a real one as the frequent used
LaTeX EC fonts (which have no Type 1 equivalent.) Using CM fonts directly it is
impossible to hyphenate accented words correctly, independed whether you type
\"a, "a or ä.
(I don't know in how far this is true for Postscript fonts or EC, or for ae
virtual fonts under ConTeXt.)

Regards, groetjes, Gruß,

Tobias