[luatex] ActualText attribute for hyphenated words

[Heilmann, Till]

This may be a feature request (or simply a stupid question).

Some PDF viewers can't find words hyphenated at the end of a line because, well, they contain a hyphen. Acrobat doesn't suffer from this limitation but Apple's Preview and derived programs, for instance, do. So my question is this:

Is it possible/desirable to let the LuaTeX PDF generator automatically tag words which are hyphenated at the end of line with a matching /ActualText attribute (so that the sequence of glyphs "hyphen- ation", for example, is internally represented as the sequence of characters 'hyphenation')? That would make sense from a linguistic viewpoint because the display of a text in a PDF is strictly presentational and may differ from its lexical and grammatical structure. It would also ensure that you can search for and find words in a LuaTeX-generated PDF with almost any viewer.

Thanks
Till
-- 
Dr. Till A. Heilmann
Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, Spring 2012

The University of Iowa
Obermann Center for Advanced Studies
111 Church St
Iowa City IA 52242
United States of America