From: Kaspar Schiess <eule@...>
Date: 2004-12-23T01:11:05+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Text::Hyphen 1.0.0

Hello Austin, 

> If you want to send me what
> you have to look over, I'll be happy to do so.

I really would like that, have my library peer-reviewed by you. Just want 
to remind you of two things before I send you the code: 

a) I was not aiming at a clean Ruby version, but porting the 
functionality. Perl is sometimes a little odd to express in Ruby, and my 
version of Text::Reform still has that oddness. It'll go away in future 
versions. 

b) I am essentially working on documentation (which is excellent in Perl 
stuff) and on unit tests. That work has to be complete before the first 
release. 

If your still interested in looking trough, yes, I would like that very 
much. 

> 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.

This will eventually be that way. But right now, I am pursuing my own 
little hyphenation-abstraction-layer, which asks you to supply a class 
that answers to '#break'. Plus, the Text::Reform class features a number 
of factory methods for such classes, like the Perl version does. It has 
#break_wrap, #break_at, #break_TeX and (will have) #break_hyphenate. This 
is part of the things that I will adapt to be more Ruby-like, perhaps by 
allowing to pass a block that does hyphenation. 

>> 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.

Text::Autoformat is fully functional, its just that I don't have 
documentation and unit tests for it, so I won't be releasing it. Tell me 
if you want to have a look at that work in progress. 

> Would you like to join Text Formatting as a developer?
I guess its a good idea to not stick to the idea of collecting those 
projects as 'perl ports projects', but rather thematically group them 
with respect to purpose. Yes, I think these two projects would be 
coherent with the purpose of your text formatting rubyforge project, so 
count me in. Glad to have found a way to release, I was getting to that 
problem in a few days ;). 

yours, kaspar