[XeTeX] xdvipdfmx, line breaks and hyphenated words

[William Adams]

On Jan 12, 2007, at 2:02 PM, Pablo Rodríguez wrote:

> one of the things that I think it would be interesting to implement in
> xdvipdfmx is one feature that Adobe generated documents (such as
> http://pdf.codev2.cc/Lessig-Codev2.pdf) have: that the searchable text
> contains no line breaks (within the same paragraphs) and hyphenated
> works aren't hyphenated in the text within.

I'm not fully understanding what you're saying here.

There's a hyphen ``transla-
tion'' on the first line of the book (pg.ix).

The book was created w/ Quark XPress v7, so the not hyphenating  
hyphenated words was probably done by manually inserting a  
discretionary hyphen at the beginning of such compounds (that's how  
QXP 6.5 and earlier has done it --- see a recent post on this to  
comp.text.tex by yours truly about having to do it by hand).

AFAIK TeX won't hyphenate a word which contains a hyphen. I'm not  
sure if this is changed in LaTeX or no. If it's not, easy enough to  
introduce a ``\allowbreak'' at need. You could do a variation of what  
I do, searching for all instances of ``-'' and replacing those which  
warrant it w/ ``-\allowbreak '' or ``-\allowbreak%
''.

If you mean that Acrobat allows a search for ``translation'' to find  
``transla-
tion'', well that works for TeX document too --- Adobe simply chose  
to ignore / stitch together parts of words on different lines  
separated by a hyphen.

Try it:

\documentclass{minimal}
\begin{document}
\noindent Transla-\\
tion
\end{document}

This has some un-intended consequences though, consider that ``compound-
interest'' will be found, even when one is searching for  
``compoundinterest'' (If I could I'd think of a good example word  
pair where that would make a difference).

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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