[tex-hyphen] Puzzling hyphenation with polyglossia and xelatex

[Jonathan Kew]

On 4 Jan 2011, at 12:44, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

> Minimal example, run with xelatex and TeXlive 2010:
> 
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage{polyglossia}
> \begin{document}
> \showhyphens{helicopter}
> \end{document}
> 
> 
> Why does my log file show 
> 
> Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 4--4
> [] \EU1/lmr/m/n/10 helicopter
> 
> instead of 
> 
> Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 4--4
> [] \OT1/cmr/m/n/10 he-li-copter
> 

Because the default LaTeX \showhyphens doesn't work with "native" fonts (i.e. those loaded without TFMs, etc) in xetex, and polyglossia loads fontspec which sets the default font to LM loaded as a "native" unicode font.

If you try actually using "helicopter" in text, you'll find that it still hyphenates fine.

To fix \showhyphens, try loading the xltxtra package.

(There's discussion of this somewhere in the list archives, IIRC.)

JK