[XeTeX] (bug?) letterspacing with LetterSpace and soul

[Pablo Rodríguez]

On 05/29/2010 09:21 PM, John Was wrote:
> Hello
>
> In plain XeTeX I find the passage in the URL works OK with letter-spaced
> Greek if I give at the start:
>
> \font \myfont =
> "MinionPro-Regular:+onum:mapping=tex-text:letterspace=12" at 12pt
> \tolerance 500
> \myfont
> \hsize 24pc

Hi John,

many thanks for your reply.

Sorry for not having answered before, but your reply was Greek to me (no 
doubt, due to my own ignorance ;-)).

> However, XeTeX doesn't know how to hyphenate Greek so to avoid overfull
> rules I have to give \- explicitly at legitimate breakpoints where the
> overfull rules occur. It's possible to invoke some of the old Babel
> hyphenation patterns by using eplain (\input eplain) but unfortunately
> Babel's Greek hyphenation patterns (in the hyphenation file
> polutonigreek) are not tied to UTF Greek so have no effect. I don't know
> if Babel is being actively maintained (since Polyglossia, which requires
> LaTeX, is a much more sophisticated replacement), but if it were
> possible to update its hyphenation patterns to cope with UTF input, that
> would be a very welcome feature for plain (Xe)TeX users.

What I don't understand why polyglossia is problematic when hyphenating 
ancient Greek with LetterSpace.

Pure XeTeX is totally foreign to me and I would need to use LetterSpace 
in a number of documents.

Is there no way to solve this?

Thanks for your help,


Pablo