Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
Another wishlist item would be to be able to use the pattern mechanism for picking between long and short s forms (won't help in the case of "Wachstube" which can have either depending on meaning, but should work for most other cases).
There's an interesting related issue: I've always wondered if it was possible to adapt the pattern mechanism to handle the cases where you don't wish to use a ligature in German (like in “auffallen”). I suppose it would need a different dictionary (you probably can't use the normal hyphenation patterns – that's my guess only), but it surely would be legitimate to instruct TeX where not to set ligatures in some languages.
Then we can devise a similar dictionary to automatically correct the “oe” into “œ” in French :-)
Certainly not the current \pattern mechanism itself, because that deals with inserting valid hyphenation points. Hyphenation in luatex is not related to fonts and ligatures. You could use <patterns> as created by patgen, but they would have to use a new primitive. If you want to experiment with something like this, write lua code that does it, and hook it into the "ligkern" caklback. Parsing pure patterns (without TeX catcodes) is very simple indeed. Best wishes, Taco