[XeTeX] Glue between ideographs suggested

[Jonathan Kew]

On 9 Feb 2007, at 5:42 am, Akira Kakuto wrote:

> Hi,
>
>> Without glues between Chinese characters it's quite easy
>> to have overfull or underfull boxes in a line ...
>
> I don't know Chinese, but please try, for example
>
> \XeTeXlinebreaklocale "zh_CN"
> \XeTeXlinebreakskip=0em plus 0.1em minus 0.01em
> \XeTeXlinebreakpenalty=0

Yes, this should allow proper line-breaks to be found, and a little  
flexibility so that text can be justified. (If you want to keep the  
Chinese characters on a fixed grid, then don't add  
\XeTeXlinebreakskip; but in that case, you'll want to make \rightskip  
stretchable because some lines may be a character or two short,  
depending on the legal break positions.)

I've had some correspondence with Japanese experts about more  
advanced spacing rules (especially concerning the spacing around  
punctuation in ideographic text), and hope to implement some  
additional features in the future, but this should be enough to get  
started for straightforward text.

>
> (line ending should be %LF)

Or it should work to set \endlinechar=-1 to cause line endings in the  
input to be ignored.

I'm glad you responded to this, Akira, as I never received the  
original post! I see it in the list archives, but it didn't show up  
in my email. A bit worrying...... :(

JK