🚀 go-pugleaf

Date: Mon, 8 Jun 87 21:25:05 PDT
From: alfke@csvax.caltech.edu (J. Peter Alfke)
Organization: California Institute of Technology

dick@ccb.ucsf.edu (Dick Karpinski) writes:
>Yep, storing the dictionary is the heart of the problem.  There is a
>guy at Stanford who did his thesis on the subject.  I forget his name
>but his thesis is published, so people at Stanford should be able to
>locate it.  I'd wager that there is available software to demonstrate
>his thesis.  He found some pretty neat ways to compress the dictionary.

This method is used in TeX (not surprising, considering that Knuth's at
Stanford -- the guy was probably one of his grad students), and is described
pretty fully in one of the appendices to The TeXbook.
Basically, there are a bunch of hyphenation templates, encoded in a funny way,
which the word is matched against and the hyphens pop out like magic.  This
works properly on all but a very few words, which can be caught in a small
explicit hyphenation dictionary.  Both the relevant files (templates and excep-
tions) come with the standard TeX distribution, so all you need to do is
implement the algorithm.
Have fun!
-- 
							pEtEr AlfkE
I'm going to have to torture you now,				  @
but I want you to know						  cSVAx
it isn't personal.						.cAlTEch.EDU

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