From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2004-12-23T00:54:33+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Text::Hyphen 1.0.0

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 00:40:45 +0900, Kaspar Schiess <eule@space.ch>
wrote:
> Austin Ziegler wrote
> (news:9e7db91104122108267c480511@mail.gmail.com):
>> No, that's Text::Format, which I'm starting work on the next
>> update tonight for release later this week.
> I have ported the Text::Reform perl library into Ruby, using also
> TeX::Hyphen for its hyphenation. Its still unreleased, but if you
> want to we could make a kind of Xmas joint release by the end of
> the year?

Well, the bad news is that I'm going on a short vacation on 26th
December and am very busy until then. If you want to send me what
you have to look over, I'll be happy to do so. Also, I will be happy
to host any text formatting related projects within the Text
Formatting project on RubyForge (http://rubyforge.org/text-format).

> I guess I could even include a 'break_hyphen' (using
> Text::Hyphenate) in addition to 'break_TeX' (using
> TeX::Hyphenate).

Actually, both TeX::Hyphen and Text::Hyphenate respond to a very
useful method, #hyphenate_to, which will hyphenate a word to a
certain number of characters *including the hyphen*. This is the
single mechanism by which the Text::Format library can use the
hyphenator as a plugin. Text::Hyphenate uses the same rules as
TeX::Hyphen -- it just uses different initialization and rule
specification.

TeX::Hyphen -- the original Perl version, not the port initially
done by Martin DeMello -- has a number of glaring problems that as I
looked at the situation would have ended up in requiring the
reimplementation of a not-small portion of the TeX code in Ruby --
and still not have been compatible with non-TeX text encodings
(e.g., ISO-8859-x and/or UTF-8 or anything else). Thus, I spent a
not-inconsiderable amount of time actually going through the TeX
font encoding documentation and comparing it against UTF-8 and
ISO-8859-x to convert T1's \355 to whatever its equivalent would be
in UTF-8, etc. This doesn't affect English formatting, but I support
Polish and several other languages that include characters like š
and č and ű that just don't show up in latin1/ISO-8859-1[5].

> I am also working on Autoformat, although that has not progressed
> as far. Is there a Rubyforge site that specialises in Perl ports ?

Martin DeMello has also expressed interest in porting 'par' to Ruby.

Would you like to join Text Formatting as a developer?

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca