[texhax] French Hyphenation

[Karl Berry]

Hi David,

Thanks for joining TUG :).

    Could anyone help me interpret the coding in the hyphenation dictionary?

Here are some sources, not all of which are necessarily consistent with
each other, but which might be enough to get you going:

- appendix H of the TeXbook gives the basic idea.  Sadly, I don't
  believe Liang's thesis is available online, not even sure if it's
  available from Stanford.

- the program itself:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/unsupported/texware/patgen.web

- material by Petr Sojka and David Antos:
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xantos/patlib/

- the tutorial by Yannis Haralambous:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/patgen2.tutorial

I'm not sure who created the French patterns specifically, but they
might be able to help too.

The good news is that you don't have to learn anything about TeX or
LaTeX to do this.  The hyphenation patterns and algorithm are completely
separate.

Hope this helps,
karl