On 08/12/2019 02:23, Doug McKenna wrote:
All the Unicode hyphenation pattern files for various languages announce
themselves using a \message{} command when executed during the building of a
TeX format file. Users never see these announcements in any log file or the
terminal, because users generally don't (re)build the format files.
For example, the UTF-8 hyphenation file at
./texmf-dist/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/loadhyph/loadhyph-af.tex
contains the line:
\message{UTF-8 Afrikaans hyphenation patterns}
The same is true for many dozens of other similar such files in that same TDS
sub-directory.
According to The TeXbook (obscurely stated on or about p. 228, top),
consecutively executed \message{} commands accumulate text on the same line,
with a space inserted between each argument string and the next. The log file
has other output that occurs between otherwise consecutive \message{} commands.
The terminal, however, doesn't receive those additional lines.
This means that one's terminal receives the following single line of text when an
uninitialized TeX engine reads in, e.g., "latex.ini":
dehyph-exptl: using a TeX engine with native UTF-8 support. German Hyphenation
Patterns (Traditional Orthography) `dehypht-x' 2017-03-31 (WL)
dehyph-exptl: using a TeX engine with native UTF-8 support. German Hyphenation
Patterns (Reformed Orthography, 2006) `dehyphn-x' 2017-03-31 (WL)
UTF-8 Afrikaans hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Hyphenation patterns for Ancient
Greek Greek hyphenation patterns for Ibycus encoding, v3.0 UTF-8 Armenian
hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Basque hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Belarusian
hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Bulgarian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Catalan
hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Hyphenation patterns for unaccented pinyin syllables
(CJK 4.8.0) UTF-8 Church Slavonic hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Coptic hyphenation
patterns UTF-8 Croatian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Czech hyphenation patterns
(Pavel Sevecek, v3, 1995) UTF-8 Danish hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Dutch
hyphenation patterns ASCII Hyphenation patterns for British English ASCII
Hyphenation patterns for American English UTF-8 Esperanto hyphenation patterns
UTF-8 Estonian hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Pan-Ethiopic hyphenation patterns
UTF-8 Finnish hyphenation patterns UTF-8 French hyphenation patterns UTF-8
Friulan hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Galician hyphenation patterns UTF-8 Georgian!
h!
yphenation patterns UTF-8 German hyphenation patterns (traditional
orthography)
... [etc.]
The \message{} commands are presumably there to create a readable record, but
needless to say this is not much fun to read.
Is there a reason these \message{} announcements are not terminated with (or
preceded by) some kind of line end character?
Doug McKenna
Mathemaesthetics, Inc.
No major reason: I modelled on the LaTeX kernel ones, which form a
sentence ...
In the end, the key is that the log says something.
Joseph
