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From: eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: New York Times and hyphenation
Message-ID: <1991May31.151146.23731@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 31 May 91 15:11:46 GMT
References: <1991May26.205830.5267@csrd.uiuc.edu> <49725@ut-emx.uucp>
Sender: news@csrd.uiuc.edu (news)
Organization: UIUC Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
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myers@ut-emx.uucp (Eric Myers) writes:

>Since you have brought the subject up... Ever since installing
>TeX 3.0 on my SparcStation I have gotten the impression that
>there is something wrong with the hyphenation in 3.0. 
>It seems to break words incorrectly  more often.  Often I find
>it breaking a word with only the last letter on the following line.

Hyphenation changed in the transition from TeX2.* to 3.0.
Two parameters \lefthyphenmin and \righthyphenmin were added,
that described the minimum number of characters allowed before and
after the hyphenation point. In TeX2.* these values were
2 and 3 hardwired. What you probably did was take a plain.tex
file (and Eric, I know you wrote your own format, so maybe you
have your own vrsion of plain.tex) compatible with 2.* and use it
for 3.*. There is a new version of plain.tex that contains
the default settings \lefthyphenmin=2 \righthyphenmin=3.

Furthermore it contains the macros \topglue and \newlanguage.
(and that's about all I remember. dig up the files and do a
diff for the rest.)

Victor.