[XeTeX] hyphenating words with a hyphen

[Ricard Roca]

Hi to all:

In classical TeX, words with a hyphen (like "by-product") are 
automatically broken only at the hyphen, e.g. you can't get "by-prod-
uct" at the end of the line, because english rules doesn't allow this. 
But in other languages, like catalan, with lots of words with a hyphen 
(typically verb-pronoun), you are allowed to break these compound words 
at places other than the hyphen. E.g. you can break "castigar" like 
"cas-ti-gar", and so you can break the compound word "castigar-me" like 
"cas-ti-gar-me". The english rules are coded into TeX-pdfTeX core, so 
you can't change them and the only way to get proper catalan hyphenation 
is writing things like castigar"-me (with LaTeX) or castigar|-|me (with 
conTeXt) instead of castigar-me (making - active would be terrible).

XeTeX has the code that deals with hyphenation rewritten, I think. Could 
it be possible to implement the possibility of breaking words with a 
hyphen at places other than the hyphen (this would be inactive by 
default and you could activate it with certain languages, like 
\XeTeXdashbreakstate). Is this possible?

Thanks in advance,

Ricard