Compound word hyphenation Hyphen library supports better compound word hyphenation and special rules of compound word hyphenation of German languages and other languages with arbitrary number of compound words. The new options, COMPOUNDLEFTHYPHENMIN and COMPOUNDRIGHTHYPHENMIN help to set the right style for the hyphenation of compound words. Algorithm The algorithm is an extension of the original pattern based hyphenation algorithm. It uses two hyphenation pattern sets, defined in the same pattern file and separated by the NEXTLEVEL keyword. First pattern set is for hyphenation only at compound word boundaries, the second one is for hyphenation within words or word parts. Recursive compound level hyphenation The algorithm is recursive: every word parts of a successful first (compound) level hyphenation will be rehyphenated by the same (first) pattern set. Finally, when first level hyphenation is not possible, Hyphen uses the second level hyphenation for the word or the word parts. Word endings and word parts Patterns for word endings (patterns with ellipses) match the word parts, too. Options COMPOUNDLEFTHYPHENMIN: min. hyph. dist. from the left compound word boundary COMPOUNDRIGHTHYPHENMIN: min. hyph. dist. from the right comp. word boundary NEXTLEVEL: sign second level hyphenation patterns Default hyphenmin values Default values of COMPOUNDLEFTHYPHENMIN and COMPOUNDRIGHTHYPHENMIN are 0, and 0 under the hyphenation, too. ("0" values of LEFTHYPHENMIN and RIGHTHYPHENMIN mean the default "2" under the hyphenation.) Examples See tests/compound* test files. Preparation of hyphenation patterns It hasn't been special pattern generator tool for compound hyphenation patterns, yet. It is possible to use PATGEN to generate both of pattern sets, concatenate it manually and set the requested HYPHENMIN values. (But don't forget the preprocessing steps by substrings.pl before concatenation.) One of the disadvantage of this method, that PATGEN doesn't know recursive compound hyphenation of Hyphen. László Németh