[XeTeX] Hyphenation of compound words in XeTeX

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 18 oct. 04, à 19:32, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

>> so that small-amplitude may be hyphenated as (I selected British 
>> hyphenation)
>>
>> small-amp-
>> litude
>>
>> if required, which is nice. However, an unwanted side effect is that 
>> I just got half-plane hyphenated as
>
> Nice? That's debatable....Knuth, at least, would presumably disagree. 
> Anyhow, it's a bug, and I just fixed it (I believe) this afternoon, so 
> this will change in the next release.

I meant nice in the sense that with standard TeX I end up with half of 
"amplitude" protruding in the right margin, so that I finally had to 
use \showhyphens to find where the hyphens are in "amplitude" then 
write "small-amp\-litude", while with XeTeX the margin is OK. I would 
have expected hyphenation to occur at the explicit hyphen, namely

small-
amplitude

but I imagine that too would violate a typographical rule, by the 
ambiguity it might create. I don't really care about where hyphens 
occur, provided there's no overfull \hbox; personally I prefer text set 
with no hyphenation at all, anywhere (except, of course, for 
compounds), and I don't mind about lines with large or small amounts of 
white space.

>> half--
>> plane
>>
>> Is there something that can be done against this?
>
> Another manifestation of the hyphenation bugs; I think if you set
> 	\lccode`\- = 0
> this will be avoided.

Which brings another question (unfortunately I've left my copy of the 
TeXbook at work): is there a way to instruct TeX (or XeTeX, for that 
matter) that lines can be broken at the explicit hyphen in 
small-amplitude or half-plane, for example.

Bruno