Re: ConTeXt german hyphenation

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Peter Willadt wrote:

> 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).
> 
> Here is an example (have I made something wrong in my setup?):
> 
> \starttext
> \useencoding[win]
> \setupoutput[pdftex]
> \setupbodyfont[ber, ptm]
> \mainlanguage[de]
> \de
> \showhyphens{Altenpflegeschülerinnen}
> \stoptext
> 
> TeX then says Al-ten-pfle-geschülerinnen
> 
> 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.

Some remarks in addition to what Tobias already responded:

If I'm right, the [] in the latex example demonstrates that no eight bit
is used at all, but indicates that something boxed is present there.   

I just ran (windows encoding, so therefore \useencoding[ibm]): 

\useencoding[ibm]
\setupbodyfont[ptm]
\mainlanguage[de]
\de
\showhyphens{Altenpflegeschülerinnen}
\hyphenatedword{Altenpflegeschülerinnen}
\stoptext

shows no [] but something 8 bit. Anyway, I'll have a look at it, maybe
something goes wrong with loading the patterns. 

Hans

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