[XeTeX] Greek Hyphenation

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 Jan 2006, at 3:54 pm, Malte Rosenau wrote:

> This is probably a very stupid question, but I'm stuck here. What  
> do I have to do to get hyphenation for classical greek? Do I have  
> to write hyphenation patterns from scratch in Unicode and create a  
> new format? The FAQ leaves me stupefied. When I turn on Babel's  
> 'polutoniko'-option, my greek text turns into garbage. Without  
> Babel everything's fine, except that there's no hyphenation...

Well, it's not a stupid question..... I'm sure others would wonder  
the same thing, if trying to use Greek. The XeTeX/Unicode world is  
different from the 8-bit legacy-encoded TeX world you're used to.

If you're working with Unicode Greek text, then yes, you do need  
"new" Greek hyphenation patterns that are expressed in terms of the  
Unicode Greek characters. Existing patterns such as grhyph.tex relate  
to ASCII character codes that are assumed to represent Greek letters,  
but that's not appropriate in a Unicode world. (I assume the Babel  
option causes some kind of remapping of the ASCII characters, which  
isn't at all what you want.)

So you could write new Unicode Greek patterns from scratch; but it  
might also be possible to start from existing patterns designed for  
an 8-bit Greek encoding (like grhyph.tex) and define the ASCII  
characters used there as \active chars, expanding to their proper  
Unicode equivalents; then loading these patterns would actually set  
up hyphenation for the Unicode Greek letters. So you don't  
necessarily have to start from scratch.

If I have a little time, perhaps I'll take a look at this, but  
perhaps this will point you in the right direction.

JK