[XeTeX] XeTeX compile error in Gentoo Linux

[Jonathan Kew]

On 29 May 2006, at 4:01 pm, 오인수 wrote:

> In my gentoo system /var/lib/texmf/web2c/texmf.conf is a symbolic  
> link to
> /etc/texmf/web2c/texmf.conf.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -----------------------------
> [root at erdos /var/lib/texmf/web2c]# ls -l texmf.cnf
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 2006-05-27 22:30 texmf.cnf -> /etc/texmf/ 
> web2c/texmf.cnf
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ----------------------------
>
> As following your simple  solution,  I  made  symbolic link  as   
> following.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -------------------------------
> ln -s /etc/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -------------------------------
>
> Next, I excuted commands that previously occured errors.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ------------------------------
> [root at erdos/usr/share/texmf/web2c]# xetex -ini  -jobname=xetex - 
> progname=xetex *xetex.ini
> .....
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -----------
> Wow, it seems OK.

Yes, that looks normal. So xetex is now finding stuff properly.

> But the following command occurs error.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ----------
> [root at erdos/usr/share/texmf/web2c]# xetex -ini  -jobname=xelatex - 
> progname=xelatex * xelatex.ini
> This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592-2.2-0.992 (Web2C 7.5.3) (INITEX)
> .....
> (/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen/huhyphn.tex
> Huhyphn - hungarian hyphenation patterns v20031107
> ! Nonletter.
> l.33 .ad౱
>            s
> ?

This is a known issue - several people have encountered it in various  
forms. The problem is that some of the standard LaTeX hyphenation  
files use 8-bit character codes in specific codepages, and cannot be  
read as Unicode text (which is what xetex tries to do).

There are "fixed" versions of some of these files among the texmf  
additions that are included with xetex, but huhyphn.tex has  
apparently not been checked yet. There are several possible workarounds:

(1) disable hyphenation for the Hungarian language in your  
language.dat configuration (you can probably edit this via texconfig  
or texconfig-sys);

(2) modify language.dat to load the older huhyph.tex patterns instead  
of huhyphn.tex, as I believe xetex provides a Unicode-compatible  
version of this;

(3) create an empty file named "huhyphn.tex" in the current  
directory, before running xetex -ini .... to create the xelatex.fmt  
format file (this will also serve to disable Hungarian hyphenation,  
although the language will still be defined).

It's possible that having dealt with Hungarian, you'll encounter a  
similar issue with some other language; it depends on your LaTeX  
language configuration. This is another issue that should get worked  
out as part of integrating xetex with the main texlive distribution;  
the current situation is a temporary hack (sorry!).

JK