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Hyphenation issue - Portuguese

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2009 7:21 pm
by skaertus
I noticed mistakes in hyphenation in Portuguese (I'm a Brazilian user of Mellel). Mellel hyphenates word "colunas" (i.e., "columns" in Portuguese) as "col-unas", (the correct would be "co-lu-nas"). I searched the source of the Mellel hyphenation dictionary for Portuguese and I noticed that it was based on TeX pattern files. I also noticed that the Portuguese TeX pattern files are rather old (they date back from 1987, 22 years ago!) and, according to the website informed by Mellel (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/hyphenation/) were last updated in 1994 (15 years ago).

Being a native speaker of Portuguese myself, I am willing to help revising the Portuguese hyphenation dictionary in my spare time (which is not much, by the way, but I'm willing to make some effort here to improve the world's best word processor). I have never used TeX before and I'm not a programmer (I'm a PhD candidate, but my field of knowledge is Law - and lawyers know nothing about LaTeX or programming; I have however, used computers for over 15 years and I consider myself a "power user"). Would it be possible to revise the Portuguese hyphenation dictionary? How could I do it?

Re: Hyphenation issue - Portuguese

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:59 pm
by Reiner
Information about improving hyphenation dictionaries can be found here: http://redlers.com/downloadhyphenation.html

I'm also not a programmer but when I once had understood the way how it works it was no big deal. If you have more questions, just ask.