[XeTeX] How to use EC font encoding in XeTeX?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 10 Jun 2006, at 10:14 am, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

>> It would be possible to extend TeX so as to support some kind of
>> mapping between the "character" codes in the text to be hyphenated
>> and the pattern codes; perhaps a new table \unicode, similar to
>> \lccode, could map font-encoded characters (in the text) to Unicode
>> values (in the hyphenation tables) on the fly. This could then be
>> changed at runtime to match the current font encoding. This would
>> need support from LaTeX/ConTeXt packages as well as an extension in
>> the program itself, though; I'm not sure it's the most worthwhile way
>> to invest effort.
>
> I am working on precisely such an extension to the program. Instead
> of the current line_break/hyphenation routines, it will do this:
>
>    @<Insert all potential hyphenation points@>;
>    @<Map characters to glyphs@>;
>    @<Insert ligatures@>;
>    @<Find optimal breakpoints@>;
>
> The amount of required change is not small, but as a side-bonus it
> greatly simplifies the structure of the linebreak handling code.
> If you can wait a few months until my code is finished it could
> be ported to XeTeX without too much trouble.

It'll certainly be interesting to see the results of this. I'll look  
forward to it!

JK