[XeTeX] Hyphenation of strings of more than 63 characters

[Jonathan Kew]

On 18/3/16 08:43, Peter Mukunda Pasedach wrote:
> I eventually managed to build xetex (on Ubuntu 14.04, with a TeX Live
> 2015 installation kept up to date) by cloning the xetex sources from
> sourceforge, then modified, as an experiment, xetex.web, replacing 63
> by 1023 in the places that seemed relevant, only guessing which ones
> they were, noticed that there's also small_number which is 63, which
> might play a role, but I didn't touch it. Also tex.ch needed to be
> adjusted to these changes. I had to install a few buildtools and
> libraries until it would build (by running the build.sh script), after
> some time I had a binary xetex in the build directory which after
> backing up the one from my regular texlive installation I copied into
> its place. Then `fmtutil --all`. After that I noticed that also
> xdvipdfmx needed to be replaced, so I followed the procedure here
> https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/tlbuild.html#Build-one-package backed
> up xdvipdfmx and replaced it with the new one. After that xelatex
> works with simple files, but once I try a file with strings longer
> than 63 characters it segfaults at the first of these, well, maybe
> that was to be expected...
>

Not all of the related constants are exactly "63"..... there are some 
instances of 64, 65, etc that need parallel changes.

(And not all "63"s should be changed. It shouldn't be necessary to touch 
tex.ch, IIRC. But I think small_number does need extending to be 
not-quite-so-small, as it gets used for various indexes etc in the 
hyphenation code.)

I have a patch that lets it successfully hyphenate very-long words, but 
still need to add a parameter to make the limit user-controllable (so 
that existing behavior can be maintained for existing documents that 
require stability). Maybe I can get this pushed out to sourceforge later 
today...

JK


> Peter
>
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Jonathan Kew wrote:
>>
>>> I'll try to get an experimental patch ready shortly. Or, of course,
>>> someone else is welcome to try. I don't think it's very hard, but it is
>>> more than just a single number.
>>
>> I have never attempted to modify *TeX since it ceased to be compiled as
>> Pascal (a language which I liked and understood -- the complete opposite
>> of my non-relationship with C); what is involved in compiling *TeX these
>> days, with particular reference to compiling for the Windows platform ?
>>
>> Philip Taylor
>>
>>
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