[XeTeX] Line-breaking algorithms in XeTeX
Jonathan Kew
jfkthame at googlemail.com
Mon Apr 27 00:50:50 CEST 2009
On 26 Apr 2009, at 14:57, John Was wrote:
> Dear All
>
> Since starting to use (plain) XeTeX I've noticed something strange
> with the paragraphing/line-breaking mechanism which has never
> happened during the ten years or so during which I have used
> traditional TeX. It is cropping up in the fourth issue of a
> periodical that I have set with XeTeX, so I'm pretty sure that it's
> not a random fluke.
>
> (1) I sometimes get an overfull rule (i.e. rectangular box) at the
> right-hand side which will disappear when I either (a) attach the
> word causing the problem to the next word with ~, forcing it over (I
> sometimes have to put the word in an \hbox{} as well); or (b) when I
> increase the line-count by giving \looseness1 for the paragraph. In
> the past, plain TeX would always make such decisions for itself and
> never generate an overfull rule when it could find a way to justify
> the paragraph without doing so. This happens most frequently in the
> reviews section of the periodical, where \looseness is set to -1 by
> default to save as much space as possible: but until I started to
> use XeTeX, it was always the case that if the paragraph could not
> lose a line, then the negative looseness was ignored and the
> paragraph was set successfully with normal looseness (i.e.
> \looseness = 0). It was never (I think) the case that a tight
> looseness which generated an overfull box would get through and need
> manual intervention from me. So has something altered in the way
> XeTeX is handling the line-breaks, giving priority to the looseness
> command even at the expense of generating an overfull rule, and even
> when zero looseness would cause that error to disappear?
>
> (2) This is even more puzzling (and more of an nuisance). For the
> purpose of sending contributors proofs of their reviews I start each
> review on a new page so that they don't also receive the tops and
> tails of adjacent reviews, but while initially typesetting I have
> the reviews running on consecutively, as they will do in the final
> published version. There is a switch at the end of each review
> which generates a \vfill \eject when \ifseparatereviews is true,
> otherwise it just produces a \vskip: there is no other difference.
> Yet I sometimes get overfull rules showing up (at random points)
> when the reviews are separated out, even though the same paragraph
> typeset without error while the reviews were set to run on
> continuously. The problem almost (but not entirely) disappears if I
> double the \hfuzz when the \ifseparatereviews switch is true, but
> that is no more than a quick fix to prevent authors receiving proofs
> with worrying blobs at the right-hand side. This seems
> incomprehensible, but as it has happened with four out of four
> periodical issues I can't be imagining it - and the commands are
> precisely the same as the ones I used when the periodical was
> typeset using traditional plain TeX, with no new parameters such as
> alteration to \spaceskip or anything else that might cause this to
> happen.
>
> (1) and (2) seem likely to be part of the same problem (though not
> necessarily so). Any ideas, or at least insight into what XeTeX is
> doing that old plain TeX didn't?
No obvious ideas come to mind; any chance you could come up with a
small test-case that illustrates the problem(s), and doesn't require
proprietary fonts, etc.?
JK
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