[XeTeX] Some problems with hyphenation and -recorder options

[Jonathan Kew]

On 12 Oct 2004, at 5:44 pm, Gilles Pérez-Lambert wrote:

> Hello,
>
> In xetex 0.86 and 0.88 (at least), there's some problem with
> hyphenation. See the tex document attached. I put a pdf file on my
> idisk public folder just in case it doesn't show in your setup
> (Finder, 'Go to iDisk public folder of another member' [or something
> like this...], my member name is gpl).
>
> The problems with hyphenation are:
> - double hyphen at the end of the line if an hyphen is already there 
> in a word.
> - or one hyphen at the end and the other at the beginning of the next 
> line.
> - last one: a compound word can have its elements hyphenated when it
> should not (better seen in the pdf file).

Hello Gilles,

This certainly sounds like a bug; but I'm puzzled by it because when I 
run your sample file, I don't get the same results. In particular, I 
don't see the "double hyphen" problem (i.e., hyphenation happening 
adjacent to an existing hyphen); nor do I get a hyphen in "wonderful".

Instead, I get some overfull boxes; it seems that xetex is failing to 
break after existing hyphens, and so the compound words project into 
the right margin because no suitable breaks are found.

This still means there's a bug; but the bug I'm seeing isn't the same 
as the bug you're seeing! I wonder why....something about your LaTeX 
language settings that alter hyphenation behavior, perhaps? Any ideas?

> The point with the -recorder option is that it doesn't record the
> fonts used (.otf or AAT ones, the real font path with font names):
> would it be possible for xdv2pdf to add some info at the end of this
> file when converting?

Good suggestion; I'll look into this.

(Note that you can get some tracing information from xdv2pdf if you run 
it separately from xetex. But that's not exactly the same as hooking in 
to the -recorder option.)

Jonathan