FOP Hyphenation patterns in Debian?

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi FOP maintainers,

FOP does not ship hyphenation patterns due to perceived license problems
by upstream¹. On the other hand, Debian ships at least some hyphenation
patterns in the texlive-base package, so it seems that we do not see a
problem here.

If that is the case we should ship a fop package with hyphenation
patterns included. The question is how to generate and ship them. Here
is the workflow: The sources seem to be included in the texlive source,
in the CTAN hyph-utf8 package. Their SVN includes a conversion script to
turn them into XML files². These XML files have to be compiled by FOP³.

Now the texlive-base-2009 package does not include the necessary files
(e.g. patterns/txt/hyph-af.lic.txt) to generate the XML files, so they
can not easily built within the texlive package. You could either create
a tarball from the SVN repository of the hyph-utf8 package or fetch the
generated XML files in the tarball
http://sourceforge.net/projects/offo/files/offo-hyphenation/2.0/offo-hyphenation_v2.0.zip/download
but that would go a bit against Debians policy of building anything from
the most primitive source available (although texlive-base-2009’s source
also seems to contain generated patterns).

If you want to build them together with FOP, the new multi-tarball
feature of dpkg might be handy.

Thanks,
Joachim


¹ http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/1.0/hyphenation.html#license-issues
Many of the hyphenation files distributed with TeX and its offspring are
licenced under the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL), which prevents
them from being distributed with Apache software. The LPPL puts
restrictions on file names in redistributed derived works which we feel
can't guarantee. Some hyphenation pattern files have other or additional
restrictions, for example against use for commercial purposes. 

² http://tug.org/svn/texhyphen/trunk/collaboration/source/offo/

³ http://offo.sourceforge.net/hyphenation/installation.html#Installation+of+FOP+XML+Hyphenation+Patterns
-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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