Re: [Groff] hyphenation and grohtml

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > PS: An interesting alternative would be to do almost the opposite:
> >     inserting soft hyphen characters at all possible hyphenation
> >     points.  Of course, this would increase the size of HTML files
> >     a lot, but it could improve the appearance of the text.  Are
> >     there browsers available which honour shc?
> 
> I fear that the commercial product that told you about that does
> just what you said may have a patent on the process. Yes, patenting
> the obvious, as usual.

Well, they can patent a product which inserts soft hyphens afterwards,
but I don't think they can prohibit to make groff directly embedding
soft hyphens in the document from the very beginning.  I can do that
right now using groff's macro capabilities -- Thomas Baruchel has
shown us how to do that kind of tricks: Set the line length to almost
zero, put the output into a diversion, handle it line by line (each
line now contains a word or a hyphenated part of a word), replace a
final hyphen with a soft hyphen (using .unformat and .substring),
etc., etc.


    Werner