[XeTeX] Can't activate hyphenation for Unicode polytonic Greek

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 Jul 2006, at 6:47 pm, jeffdod at netzero.net wrote:

> I am having trouble activating Unicode hyphenation for polytonic
> Greek. Here is what I have done:
>
> I obtained the hyphenation file "uni-grhyph.tex" off of the internet
> and place this file in my texmf/tex/generic/hyphen folder.
>
> I edited the language.dat file and changed both the polygreek and
> ancientgreek entries to use "uni-grhyph.tex" instead of "grhyph.tex."
>
> I rebuilt xelatex.fmt by executing "fmtutil --byfmt xelatex."
>
> These steps did rebuild the xelatex.fmt file. However, when I compile
> my Unicode Greek document with XeLaTeX, it still comes up with
> zillions of Overfull \hbox's, and has many words extending into the
> right margin.
>
> Did I leave out a step somewhere?

Did you specify the use of the Greek language for hyphenation in your  
source? The .fmt file may contain the patterns for many languages,  
but only one is active for any given piece of text, and the default  
is English.

\usepackage[greek]{babel} ought to be one way to do this, but I  
suspect Babel may interfere with Unicode Greek text, as it is closely  
tied to legacy input and font encodings. Perhaps a LaTeX expert here  
could tell us the proper way to select a different hyphenation  
language *without* loading the Babel package?

(I think an unofficial way would be to insert:

   \language=\csname l at greek\endcsname

before the text, but there ought to be a normal user-level command  
that accomplishes this.)

JK