[tex-hyphen] Puzzling hyphenation with polyglossia and xelatex

[Jonathan Kew]

TeX doesn't hyphenate the first word of a paragraph. It's to do with the rules about finding candidate letter sequences; IIRC, it might be the \hbox for the paragraph indent that's preventing it. The TeXbook explains it all fully, but I'm away from my copy just now.

You can probably "fix" this, if desired, by inserting \allowhyphens before the first word, where \allowhyphens is defined as

  \def\allowhyphens{\nobreak \hskip 0pt \relax}

so that the first word is preceded by some (zero-width) glue. Or even use \everypar to insert this (how to make that play nicely with LaTeX packages that also want to use \everypar is left as an exercise.....)

JK

On 16 Dec 2010, at 05:52, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

> I've just realized that this behaviour doesn't depend on polyglossia or xelatex.  I still find it puzzling.
> 
> D
> 
> On 16 December 2010 14:50, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com> wrote:
>