[XeTeX] Strange hyphenation with polyglossia in French

[Paul Isambert]

  I can't answer your main question (about hyphenation after an 
apostrophe), but there are some points I can explain.


Le 16/10/2010 11:47, Cyril Niklaus a écrit :
> In making the small version I include here, I also noticed something surprising: the hyphenation changed depending on the length of the text I cut *after*. Leaving one sentence or two did not give the same results. Cutting immediately after the sentence gave the correct l'in-formation and  l'infor-mation was what I got when cutting before De toute part.

That's absolutely normal, that's even the reason why we use TeX :)
TeX builds a paragraph as a whole; if you remove some words at the end 
of your paragraph, it might change its entire shape.

> I also noticed that including or not
> \defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}
> changes things quite a bit while \frenchspacing did nothing obvious. I thought it would deal with spaces around the guillemets etc. but no. I'm wondering why I bothered including it. Is that a benefit from polyglossia?
>

\frenchspacing has nothing to with polyglossia, and it /is/ extremely 
important, even though you might not notice at once. It's a macro 
inherited from plain TeX, whose effect is to disable extra space after 
strong punctuation marks (e.g. a period), which extra space is used in 
(some flavors of) English typography. So keep it, although indeed it 
doesn't deal with space around guillemets.

Best,
Paul
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