[XeTeX] weird behaviour with LetterSpace

[Jonathan Kew]

On 1 Jun 2010, at 20:00, Pablo Rodríguez wrote:

> I'm not especially interested in LetterSpace, but in hyphenation with Letterspace (as you can see at http://www.ousia.tk/grammatike.pdf).
> 

I can't think of any reason why LetterSpace should prevent hyphenation. Are you sure it's not just that there isn't enough flexibility in the line for TeX to find "acceptable" breaks, and so it leaves an overfull box? You could try LaTeX's \sloppy declaration to allow looser spacing; and if this proves helpful, you could look into fontspec's word-spacing controls. Making the word spaces more stretchable in the letterspaced text might be what you need in order for line-breaking and hyphenation to have a better chance of success.

> BTW, acroread-9.3 in Ubuntu-10.04 copies the following text (the same text that evince 2.30 copies):
> 
> χαλεπὰ τ ὰ κ α λ ά
> χ α λ ε π ὰ τ ὰ κ α λ ά
> χ α λ ε π ὰ τὰ καλά
> Beauty i s d i ffi c u l t
> B e a u t y i s d i ffi c u l t
> B e a u t y is difficult

You're right, I get a similar result with Adobe Reader - I mis-spoke previously. It's actually Apple's Preview that gets the word boundaries correct even with the letterspaced text.

JK