[OS X TeX] One line is longer than the others

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 21 mai 07 à 08:12, Frank STENGEL a écrit :

> \showhyphens{sables} (and \showhyphens{sable}) show that sables  
> cannot be broken. Could be there is a bug in the current version of  
> the french hyphenation rules?

There's been discussions on the XeTeX mailing list for launching a  
Unicode-friendly re-implementation of babel, separating and allowing  
selective activation of the 4 basic actions of babel for each language:

- Selecting a hyphenation pattern.

- Translating hard-coded LaTeX strings (\chaptername, \sectionname,  
\contentsname, \figurename, etc.).

- Enforcing assumed language-specific standard typographic  
conventions (for French, for example, making the space at the end of  
a sentence a normal space; inserting a space before ":", "!", "?",  
";"; suppressing inter-item vertical space in lists; using an en-dash  
"--" to label all list items at any list level; etc.).

- Selecting specific fonts (a Cyrillic font for Russian, a Greek font  
for Greek, etc.).

See:

<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.xetex/4191>
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.xetex/4197>
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.xetex/4213>
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.xetex/4225>

I don't know whether this project will go anywhere, or transform into  
vaporware owing to the vastness of what's to be done.

In any case, something that would be nice, but which probably will  
ever remain a dream, is that some standard format would emerge one  
day for hyphenation patterns (and dictionaries as well), and that TeX  
could use it. That would allow TeX to share its hyphenation patterns  
with OpenOffice and similar applications. That would avoid wasting  
time replicating the same work in different contexts, and allow TeX  
to benefit from the work of other people (i.e. to use the hyphenation  
patterns of OpenOffice for example).

Bruno Voisin
------------------------- Helpful Info -------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/
List Reminders & Etiquette: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/list/