Re: [Groff] hyphenation in words with explicit hyphen

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I don't think this is useful.  In fact, TeX's behavior in this
> respect has always given me trouble.

Hmm, german.sty has the command "= which inserts an explicit hyphen,
allowing hyphenation before and after the hyphen.  I can't imagine
that Dutch language support files for LaTeX don't have this (or a
similar) feature.

> In Dutch it is very common to have words with explicit hyphens.
> Whereas in English composite words are usually written as separate
> words, and in German often as one word, Dutch has an intermediate
> position: the words are joined together by hyphens.  For example,
> 'software engineer' would have been written in Dutch as
> 'software-engineer', and, I believe, in German as
> 'softwareengineer'.  For compositions not consisting of nouns, Dutch
> usually writes the words as one.  For example, 'samenstelling'
> (composition, German: Zusammenstellung) is written as one word,
> because the first part (samen: together) is not a noun.  When a
> composition is in common use, it gradually becomes to be regarded as
> a single noun, and the hyphen is eliminated.  Still, there are many
> word compositions that are hyphenated.  The separate words are often
> rather long, and so hyphenation only at the explicit hyphen, leads
> to rather large white spaces in the sentence.

Because both `software' and `engineer' count as foreign words (from
different languages) in German, I would write `Software-Ingenieur'.
But it looks very ugly if it is hyphenated as

  blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla bla Software-In-
  genieur blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabl
  blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla

Nevertheless, I can live with

  blablabla blablabla bla blablabla blablablab bla Software-Entwick-
  ler blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablablabla
  blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla blablabla

I would use a distance of 6 characters before and after the explicit
hyphen for a document written in German.

BTW, it is really hard to tell groff to hyphenate only at the explicit
hyphen!  You must say `\%Software-\:Ingenieur' (the `\:' is a new
escape sequence to insert a zero-width breakpoint) -- just curious: Is
it possible with older groff versions (i.e. not the current snapshot)
to do that?  I did some quick tests and couldn't find a solution.


    Werner