>> As mentioned above, the hyphenation patterns are constructed with >> certain \lefthyphenmin and \righthyphenmin values. However, those >> values are *not* present in the hyphenation patterns – you have to >> know them (I consider this a design bug in TeX). In other words, >> only the user knows that values 16 or 32 are valid for a given >> language's hyphenation patterns or not. > > Could groff pluck optional left and right minimums from the > filename, e.g. `hyphen.us'?
Yes, groff could set up key-value pairs to map the file name (or, maybe better, the language code) to the left and right minimum values. > Or allow an optional extra file based on that name that has them as > content? This is another possibility, yes. I will discuss the issue on the TeX hyphenation mailing list; I think it is best to add two standardized identifiers % \lefthyphenmin=X % \righthyphenmin=Y into the header comment of all hyphenation pattern files (in https://github.com/hyphenation/tex-hyphen/tree/master/hyph-utf8/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/tex). Werner
