[XeTeX] The xetex-greek package

[Pablo Rodríguez]

Alexej Kryukov wrote:
>> FYI, I'm copying this announcement through to this list, for those
>> who are interested (see appended). Wasn't someone talking about Greek
>> unicode hyphenation a while back? I'm guessing this should be added
>> to the XeTeX installer.
> 
> Some time ago I have done a similar work for antomega (my
> language support package for omega/lambda, see
> http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/omega/contrib/antomega/).
> Now the most part of antomega is probably obsolete (as I am
> moving to XeTeX myself), but the Greek hyphenation patterns
> can be used with XeTeX virtually without any modifications.
> The files are based on the same source by D. Philippou, but differ from
> those supplied in xetex-greek at the following points:
> 
> -- instead of the UTF-8 encoding I had used the ^^^^xxxx notation
> to represent 16-bit characters. This is the standard way of
> representing Unicode strings in omega when no translation processes
> (OCP) are available at the time the file is loaded, and I think this
> notation should be preferred for XeTeX hyphenation patterns too, as
> it allows to keep them compatible with omega;

I think that using utf-8 is better for compatibility with ConTeXt.

> -- I have added an extra set of rules which are necessary to properly
> handle initial accented vowels. These rules don't exist in the original
> patterns by D. Philippou, because they are not needed for standard
> TeX, where an ASCII transliteration is used to encode Greek so that
> each accent is typed separately.

The patterns provided by the xetex-greek package include an interesting
feature that seems to be missing from the antomega files. They offer
polytonic hyphenation for oxia and tonos accented vowels and antomega
offers it only for tonos. I don't know whether Omega can handle both
accents specifying only one in the patterns, but probably XeTeX cannot.

By the way, which are the line numbers of the extra set of rules for
initial accented vowels in your hyphenation patterns for antomega?

Thanks for your help,


Pablo