{Hyphenation past and future: \code{hyph-utf8} and \code{patgen}}
{Arthur Reutenauer, Mojca Miklavec}
{(There won't be enough time for all of this.)

1. Regenerating \code{patgen}:\\
In the course of my work about hyphenation patterns, I often wondered
about overhauling the program \texttt{patgen}, that given a list of
hyphenated words, produces patterns (it's the \emph{pat}tern
\emph{gen}erator).  This venerable program had been written by Frank
Liang as he was working on his well-known algorithm, and had essentially
not changed in over thirty years, except for an extension at the
beginning at the 1990s to support 8-bit encodings, from 7 bits
originally.  A later rewrite in \Cplusplus\ proved completely unusable
because it used mysterious tricks that worked only for one specific
version of one specific compiler.

It served the community well, producing many sets of hyphenation
patterns for different languages, but it had a number of
shortcomings\Dash lack of Unicode support to start with\Dash and it
seemed time to resume work on it, be it only to re-explore the main
algorithm.  Earlier this year I did just that, using Ruby which is one
of my languages of choice these days.  I will make a public release soon
and will share some of the lessons learnt along the way, and future
plans.

2. \code{hyph-utf8}, eight years on:\\
Hyphenation has always been central in \TeX, to the point that Donald
Knuth had one of his students, Frank~Liang, develop an algorithm for it,
and create a set of patterns for English.  Over the years, patterns have
been created for many languages and in 2008 we set to convert all these
patterns from legacy 8-bit encodings to \UTF-8 and put them in a single
place, the package called \code{hyph-utf8}.  We also took the opportunity to
clarify the legal situation of the patterns for a few languages, as some
files had not been released under clear licence terms, and we made
contact with other communities who had an interest in \TeX\ hyphenation
patterns, thus creating some fruitful collaborations.

Eight years on, the project is still alive and well, and responding to
internal as well as external challenges.  It has long outgrown its
original purpose and could be slowly turning into the central hub for
hyphenation data for all free software, hence putting the spotlight on
\TeX\ on this\Dash admittedly very specific\Dash typographical feature.
We will give a summary of the current situation, outlining the
challenges we're facing, and we'll share our future plans, that will
hopefully be as exciting to the audience as they are to us.
}