Hi Arthur, Thank you for the response!
You’re not the first ;-) but it’s always interesting to hear that > TeX’s algorithms are used elsewhere. What is your project? > Indeed - and I certainly won't be the last :) The project is called three-text, it's a 3D font renderer for the web GitHub: https://github.com/countertype/three-text Demo: https://countertype.com/tools/three-text/demo The line breaker has some optimizations for speed since it doesn't need to do full page layout, and includes the UAX #14 rules for CJK, inspired by pTeX and xeCJK. It ended up pretty similar to the SILE implementation; I started by looking at tex.web, but it took me a long time to wrap my head around the intent of some decisions and magic numbers that I eventually learned were based on CPU and memory constraints at the time TeX was written. It's been fun getting to know more about the history there That’s very good; I just changed the licence to MIT Fantastic! we’re trying to harmonise all files to that licence. > It's worth mentioning I did recently hear from Terry Mart and Jörg Knappen, authors of the Indonesian patterns; Terry is no longer involved and deferred to Jörg, who let me know he chose GPL on principle, and seems aligned with the Free Software Foundation's thinking on open source, so that one may be a challenge with regard to MIT. I did not hear back from the authors of Czech, Serbian, or Macedonian, which I believe are the remaining GPL-only languages Thanks and best, Jeremy On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 2:01 PM Arthur Rosendahl < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi Jeremy, > > Thank you for your email. > > On Sun, Feb 01, 2026 at 08:30:36PM -0800, Jeremy Tribby wrote: > > I have been working on an open source project that uses a TeX-based > > linebreaker > > You’re not the first ;-) but it’s always interesting to hear that > TeX’s algorithms are used elsewhere. What is your project? > > > The computer scientist Janka Chlebíková, author of the Slovak patterns, > > wrote back to let me know that she is supportive of more permissive use. > > That’s very good; I just changed the licence to MIT (no dual use) in > the master file ( > https://github.com/hyphenation/tex-hyphen/blob/ac5045f7552b1b4fa4ab8aaba9e4a9bd72bcf5e6/hyph-utf8/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/tex/hyph-sk.tex > ) > as we’re trying to harmonise all files to that licence. > > > I saw the note in the tex-hyphen repo about contacting the > > maintainers via this address; please let me know if I can help / if > there's > > any action to take (such as a PR to the repo on GitHub) > > You don’t need to do anything. We’ll make an upload to CTAN and the > file will make its way to the distributions under its new licence, and > in any case it’s already published on GitHub. > > Best, > > Arthur >
