> Or do I have to add .hcode requests by myself? You do. Which shows that my original example must have been hyphenated at another pattern, since as a standalone example it didn't contain a useful hyphenation code for the umlaut. Sorry about that. (Well, it could always have been the case that groff doesn't hyphenate words with unknown characters at all, but that's not the way it works.)
See below for a better example. > Second question: Do I have to write ".hla den" or ".hla de"? > There is no error message in both cases and the documentation > is not 100% clear. You can use any name. This is just to associate hyphenation patterns with a tag, so you can easily switch between languages (without always reloading the pattern files): .pl 8v .ll 25n .hla xx .hpf hyphen.det .hcode ä ä Ä ä .hy 1 .ds a \(:a Das ist doch zum schwarz\*argern. .br .hla en .hpf hyphen.us Das ist doch zum schwarz\*argern. .br .hla xx Das ist doch zum schwarz\*argern. .br .hla en Das ist doch zum schwarz\*argern. nroffs as Das ist doch zum schwarz- ärgern. Das ist doch zum schwarzärgern. Das ist doch zum schwarz- ärgern. Das ist doch zum schwarzärgern.