[Fedora TeX Live] texlive-hyphen-english contains no files

[Michael J Gruber]

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard venit, vidit, dixit 12.12.2011 14:57:
> Hi,
> 
> Le 12/12/2011 12:46, Mojca Miklavec a écrit :
>>> - There are (almost?) no (standard, non-utf8) hyphenation pattern files
>>> in the standard tree, even though I have texlive-hyph-utf8.
>> [...]
>>> From texlive-hyph-utf8's info I get the impression that the usual
>>> hyphenation patterns do not get installed at all any more, that is:
>>> everyone's supposed to use the prebuilt fmt files (or use a utf8 engine).
>>
>> The fact that there are only UTF-8 patterns in the tree doesn't mean
>> that you have to use an UTF-8 engine. Most patterns work just fine
>> with pdftex (of course sanskrit, ethiopic, indic patterns, lao, ...
>> won't, but that's a different story).
>>
> I didn't follow the beginning of the discussion, so sorry if I'm repeating
> something that was said earlier, but at this point I think it's worth mentioning
> explicitly that, in addition to utf-8 patterns, hyph-utf8 also contains wrappers
> that allow loading these files with 8-bit engines such as pdfTeX, by transcoding
> them on the fly at format generation time.

I think basically that is in hyph-utf8's description, although I
understand that only now, after your explanation.

> So the "usual" (standard, non-utf8) patterns are useless, since they have all
> been converted to a form (the modern utf-8 patterns with their loaders) that is
> usable by both Unicode and non-Unicode engines.
> 
> I'm not sure if Fedora distributes pre-built .fmt files (upstream TeX Live
> certainly doesn't) but I can assure you that the file in hyph-utf8 (plus a few
> exceptions like the original Knuth patterns) are what is used to generate these
> .fmt files, even for pdfTeX.

Thanks everyone for the patient explanations. The picture is pretty
clear now.

While it's entirely possible that many people would have understood this
from the package info and I simply failed to, I'm wondering whether it's
possible to make it clearer.

For hyphen-german and such, saying "Activate hyphenation patterns..."
might help, although later in the text "the package includes" is pretty
explicit and leads (lead me) into the wrong direction.

For hyph-utf8, the phrase "it is hoped that... will completely supplant
the older patterns" is the one which I consider to be the most
misleading one. I read it as "there are still old patterns, but you
could use these newer ones, if you use the converters from this
package". When in fact (at least as packaged in Fedora) those are the
ones being used, whether 8bit or utf8.

Cheers,
Michael