[tex-hyphen] hyphenation different in xelatex?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2015-09-07 at 16:50:46 +0100, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:

 > > I always believed that my diploma thesis got lost, we used
 > > floppies at that time.  But I unexpectedly found my LaTeX files
 > > recently on a CD.  They compiled like a charm after more than a
 > > quarter century.  I was quite surprised that it worked perfectly
 > > with LaTeX-2e, which even didn't exist at that time.  There was
 > > no need to modify any file.
 > 
 >   Did you have the original output to compare with?  Does it match
 > glyph-by-glyph?  I'm always interested in concrete examples of TeX's
 > stability.

I have a printed copy, so I can compare it with the output of
pdflatex.

But don't expect too much.  Hyphenatation depends on fonts.  In my
thesis I used Knuth's (7 bit) fonts.  Because accented glyphs were
composed by the \accent primitive, I had to hyphenate many words
manually.

The reason is that \accent inserts a word boundary and \lefthyphenmin
and \righthypenmin are applied to each part of the word.  So it's very
unlikely that a word with accented characters is hyphenated
automatically.

A few years later 8-bit fonts became available with "real" accented
glyphs.  No need to use \accent anymore.  This was a big step forward.
I must admit that I don't miss the good old days.

 > > Mojca, of course it's more work to maintain the old and new
 > > patterns at the same time.  But can't the old patterns be simply
 > > declared as being frozen forever?
 > 
 >   In effect, they already are.  The question is what to do with
 >   them.

Please keep them.  ;)

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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