[XeTeX] hyphenating words with a hyphen

Ricard Roca ricardroca at gmail.com
Sun Nov 5 19:58:07 CET 2006


Hi
> Have you tried using the catalan hyphenation rules in babel? i.e.,
>
> \usepackage[catalan]{babel}
>
>   
Of course. I use catalan hyphenation rules (by the way, I use ConTeXt, 
not LaTeX), but it doesn't help. (pdf)TeX simply doesn't allow words 
with hyphens to be broken at places other than the hyphen. Also, TeX 
doesn't hyphenate words with apostrophes, but you can write

\lccode`\'=`\'

somewhere (in the preamble, etc.) and

2'2

in the language hyphenation patterns file, and rebuild format files. 
It's a matter of hyphenation patterns and which characters TeX considers 
as letters. But it doesn't work with hyphens. It seems that it is 
hardcoded and you can't change it with macros, active caracters, 
catcodes, etc. If it could be possible, I'm sure that LaTeX and ConTeXt 
developers would have find a way to input simply a - and get the desired 
result. Hans Hagen (the main ConTeXt developer) explains that it's 
hardcoded and you cannot change it (so in ConTeXt you input |-|).

Ricard


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