[XeTeX] xunicode.sty bug

[Will Robertson]

On 19/07/2006, at 7:33 , Ross Moore wrote:

> Hi Jonathan, Ralf, Will, Toralf, and others.
> Without changing this mechanism, it seems that having
>      \hyphenchar=^^ad
> would do the right thing, provided the font has a glyph there.
> This is a matter for  fontspec  to determine, yes ?

Yes, fontspec from v1.9 has this capability
   \fontspec[HyphenChar=-]{FPL Neu}
Or use whatever glyph or char slot you like.

> I suppose the issue is really what happens to any hyphenations
> when you select and copy a paragraph from a PDF prepared by XeTeX.
> Is the U+00AD actually present within the Unicode string ?
> Do you see the glyph or not when the result is pasted into a
> text-editor ?

I guess it would be kind of neat if XeTeX could insert these soft  
hyphens even where they're not used for hyphenation into the PDF;  
this would aid XHTML production with hyphenation, which browsers need  
a fair bit of help with, I believe..

>> In the case of xetex, I think a sensible default (to handle the
>> situation where U+00AD occurs in the input text) would be to say:
>>
>>      \catcode"AD=\active
>>      \let^^ad=\-
>
> This seems to be the right implementation, when an author
> has included ^^ad (by whatever means) within the source.
>
> It seems to me that these assignments are completely standard,
> so belong in  xetex.xfmt , rather than being added by a package.
> I could put them into xunicode.sty , but really don't think that
> it is appropriate. Agreed ?

If not in the format, then there could be a "unicode markup" package  
to include little things like this. I'd be happy with either.

Will