[XeTeX] Xetex and Komascript Compatibility

[Thomas Gyger]

Jonathan Kew a écrit :
>>> 2. Does anybody have some suggestions for a fix or workaround ?
>>
>> You mean the over-full box? Change the text, change the font, change 
>> the width of text (no textarea, but geometry), apply more kerning, 
>> remove the unbreakable space characters.
>
> Loading textarea is changing the margins/line-length of your text, so 
> it's not surprising this can affect line-breaking, and in this 
> particular case it leads to a situation where TeX can't find "good 
> enough" line breaks. The quickest fix is probably to use the LaTeX 
> "\sloppy" command to relax the spacing constraints, but there may be 
> better ways to fine-tune the behavior.
>
> If you want to get sophisticated, fontspec has options to allow you to 
> control the stretchability of interword spaces when you load a font, 
> so you can use this to give TeX more or less flexibility.

The example I have provided is only one of many cases in the same text. 
Although I did no systematic testing yet, it seems to happen especially 
with french texts. In a roughly 150 pages book of very common french 
novel text, almost without foreign word, it would be ok if i had to 
tweak 1-5 such occurences by hand. But when this happens every 2-3 pages 
then I suspect a bug somewhere (or a setting error on my side).
The specialty i see in the sentence provided  are the many  kommas. 
Earlier I remember having seen posts about issues with Babel/Xetex' 
handling of apostrophes in french. This why I actually switched to 
Polyglossia.

> I did notice one problem when I tried adding \sloppy to your example: 
> this got rid of the overfull box, but I got a hyphen in "dési-rs", 
> which surely can't be right. Looking in polyglossia's 
> gloss-french.ldf, I see that it sets \righthyphenmin to 2, using 
> \setlocalhyphenmins{french}{2}{2}. Changing this to {2}{3} prevents 
> the bad hyphenation (and gives "dé-sirs" instead, which looks more 
> reasonable to my non-French eyes).
>
> François, could you check on this? Should gloss-french.ldf be changed, 
> if the patterns are not safe for \righthyphenmin=2, or is something 
> else wrong in my setup?
>
>>
>> BTW, you're writing in a simple Latin-based left-to-right script and 
>> language. There is no real necessity to use experimental XeLaTeX, 
>> ripe pdfTeX based LaTeX will work as well ...
>
> Perhaps he wants to use fonts that are painful to set up in 
> pdftex-based LaTeX, but easy to use in xelatex... I think many people 
> use it for that reason.
Correct, that's exactly the reason why I use XeLaTex.

Many thanks for your feedback so far

Tom