[XeTeX] again russian, german, english...

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 Feb 2006, at 12:53 pm, Martin Henning wrote:

> hi Jonathan, finally some sort of internet again - 300B/s but  
> better than nothing *g*

How very medieval! :)
>>
>> In your example last week, I saw some instances of long words  
>> separated by slashes, e.g, современные/ 
>> передовые. Note that the slash here will (by default)  
>> inhibit hyphenation. You might want to use LaTeX's \slash instead  
>> (which permits a line-break after the slash); or if you want to  
>> allow hyphenation of the words each side of the slash, then you  
>> need to introduce some (zero-width) glue.
>
> This was just for me - just didn't know, yet, which word i was  
> going to use. The zero-width glue thing is unfortunately as far  
> away as chinese for me :')

Just meaning that adding "\hskip0pt\relax" after the slash in  
optional/alternative words would allow hyphenation of the second  
word, otherwise not attempted by TeX.

>
>>> English hyphenation doesn't seem to function at all, because i  
>>> found (among right things...) stuff like "art-icle", which for my  
>>> understanding is wrong.
>>
>> Yes, that seems odd. Can you provide a sample file that  
>> demonstrates such errors?
>
> yep. trying to upload it :)

I see the bad art-icle in your PDF, but when I re-run the sample  
here, I get "arti-cle" instead! Very odd. Apparently something about  
my configuration is different from yours. Could I see your  
language.dat file (as located by "kpsewhich language.dat") to see if  
I can reproduce the problem you're having?

>> The rules for \baselineskip, \lineskip, and \lineskiplimit are a  
>> little tricky. With a sufficiently negative \lineskiplimit, you'll  
>> get lines spaced according to \baselineskip all the time (which  
>> your LaTeX class will set up according to its wishes). With  
>> OpenType/TrueType fonts in XeTeX, and without a negative  
>> \lineskiplimit, you'll often find you're actually setting the  
>> lines "solid" (according to the font metrics, which are usually  
>> larger than the actual glyph sizes), and the \baselineskip that  
>> LaTeX wanted to set is effectively being ignored.
>
> ok, so with -5 a get nice line spacing - as long i don't have  
> superscripted figures etc. as soon as the index of a footnote  
> appears, the whole line jumps down back to huge spacing :) that  
> is... hmm... bad :)
> i'll try to include that in the example file, too!

So -5pt is just enough to avoid \lineskip kicking in (because of the  
ascent/descent of Charis) with running text, but when you have a  
raised figure, that exceeds the threshold, and again \baselineskip is  
abandoned in favor of \lineskip.

Solution is to make \lineskiplimit slightly larger (err... more  
negative, I mean). Seems like -6pt is enough for this sample, at least.

JK