[XeTeX] Xetex and Komascript Compatibility

[Jonathan Kew]

On 12 Jun 2009, at 10:44, Peter Dyballa wrote:

>>
>> 2. Does anybody have some suggestions for a fix or workaround ?
>
> You mean the over-full box? Change the text, change the font, change  
> the width of text (no textarea, but geometry), apply more kerning,  
> remove the unbreakable space characters.

Loading textarea is changing the margins/line-length of your text, so  
it's not surprising this can affect line-breaking, and in this  
particular case it leads to a situation where TeX can't find "good  
enough" line breaks. The quickest fix is probably to use the LaTeX  
"\sloppy" command to relax the spacing constraints, but there may be  
better ways to fine-tune the behavior.

If you want to get sophisticated, fontspec has options to allow you to  
control the stretchability of interword spaces when you load a font,  
so you can use this to give TeX more or less flexibility.

>
>>
>> 3. From the logfile, it appears that Babel is automatically loaded  
>> implicitely, even if I actually wanted to use
>> Polyglossia. Is this normal, necessary, problematic ?
>
> I don't see it happening ...

The LaTeX "welcome message" always mentions Babel, but this really  
just refers to the hyphenation patterns that are compiled-in to the  
format; it's not the same as explicitly loading the babel package in  
your document.

I did notice one problem when I tried adding \sloppy to your example:  
this got rid of the overfull box, but I got a hyphen in "dési-rs",  
which surely can't be right. Looking in polyglossia's gloss- 
french.ldf, I see that it sets \righthyphenmin to 2, using  
\setlocalhyphenmins{french}{2}{2}. Changing this to {2}{3} prevents  
the bad hyphenation (and gives "dé-sirs" instead, which looks more  
reasonable to my non-French eyes).

François, could you check on this? Should gloss-french.ldf be changed,  
if the patterns are not safe for \righthyphenmin=2, or is something  
else wrong in my setup?

>
> BTW, you're writing in a simple Latin-based left-to-right script and  
> language. There is no real necessity to use experimental XeLaTeX,  
> ripe pdfTeX based LaTeX will work as well ...

Perhaps he wants to use fonts that are painful to set up in pdftex- 
based LaTeX, but easy to use in xelatex... I think many people use it  
for that reason.

JK