index-en.html

<h2><a name="Summary">Summary</a></h2>

<p>
This page describes the hyphenation patterns needed for
proper typesetting of Irish language text using
<a target="_blank" href="https://www.tug.org/">TeX</a>,
<a target="_blank" href="https://www.libreoffice.org/">LibreOffice</a>,
<a target="_blank" href="https://www.openoffice.org/">OpenOffice.org</a>,
<a target="_blank" href="https://apps.kde.org/office">KOffice</a>,
<a target="_blank" href="https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/">GNU Troff</a>,
<a target="_blank" href="https://www.scribus.net/">Scribus</a>,
<a target="_blank" href="http://defoe.sourceforge.net/folio/folio.html">Folio</a>,
<a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/mnater/hyphenator">Hyphenator.js</a>,
and <a target="_blank" href="https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/">Apache FOP</a>.
The latest versions of Firefox also include support for
hyphenation when laying out web pages, and we expect
other browsers to allow this in the future as well.
</p>

<p>
You'll find downloadable packages and installation instructions
on the <a href="usaid-en.html">Download page</a>.
</p>

<p>
You can check out a <a href="tastail-en.html">live demo</a> of
the hyphenation patterns in your browser that makes use
of the Hyphenation.js package.  You can resize your browser window
to see the hyphenations change, or click the icon at the very top right
of the window to turn hyphenation off completely.
You can find the same document typeset using LaTeX
<a href="tastail.pdf">here</a>, and a screenshot of it in
LibreOffice 
<a href="tastail.png">here</a>.
</p>

<p>
You can also read a
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77scannell.pdf">short article</a> I've written that treats the development of these hyphenation
patterns for Irish, and discusses the development of
computing resources for minority languages more generally.
</p>

<hr>
<h2>Contributing</h2>

<p>
I know of no explicit standards for hyphenation of Irish.
Instead I relied upon:

<ul>
<li>a small initial database of hyphenated words
from actual printed material,</li>
<li>hyphenations inserted automatically according to 
certain morphological rules, and</li>
<li>statistical methods to bootstrap to a larger database.</li>
</ul>
</p>

<p>
Occasionally I had to resort to my own (poor) judgement.
Therefore the resulting rules are far from perfect and 
likely reflect my
idiosyncratic preference for etymological/morphological
hyphenation over phonological.  Please see the 
<a href="sonrai-en.html">Details</a> page for more
information on what I did and for some concrete examples.
</p>

<p>
If you'd like to help improve future releases, the easiest way
is to use the patterns to typeset your own documents and
report any problems you encounter.
Alternatively, you can look for errors among the
<a href="mile-en.html">Top 1000</a>
most frequent words in Irish, hyphenated according to the
current pattern set. 
</p>