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

[John Was]

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

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.

Best


John






----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Pablo Rodríguez" <oinos at web.de>
To: <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: 29 May 2010 19:35
Subject: [XeTeX] (bug?) letterspacing with LetterSpace and soul


> Hi Jonathan and others,
>
> some days ago, I asked for a way to enable soul to properly emphasize by 
> letterspacing an ancient Greek text.
>
> Jonathan replied that Letterspace should be the way to go. It doesn't seem 
> to work, since the first line on page 6 from 
> http://www.ousia.tk/grammatike.pdf shows that hyphenation is simply 
> broken.
>
> I wonder whether this is normal behaviour or it should be considered as a 
> bug in XeTeX.
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
>
> Pablo
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
>