[XeTeX] hyphenating ancient Greek

Nikola Lecic nlecic at EUnet.yu
Fri Apr 13 15:04:18 CEST 2007


On Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:11:15 +0200
Pablo Rodríguez <oinos at web.de> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> I'm typesetting a book which contains some words and expressions in
> ancient Greek. Hyphenation using babel works fine but some
> hyphenations may be right but they look weird to the reader (such as
> ἐ-στι or ἐνέργει-α).
> 
> These only happen with the Greek text. I have two questions: is there
> any way to avoid that hyphenation takes place if less than two (or
> three) characters are left in a line? Would it be possible to use a
> different hyphenation character only for Greek?

I can offer you a couple of hints how to avoid it:

(i) if I use an OTF font with full Glyph Positioning Table etc. I have zero unwanted hyphenations (in a 120-pages document with a lot of Ancient Greek). If I use plain TTF, I get 10 or so;

(ii) I have (I'm not sure if it does matter in this case):

	\XeTeXlinebreakskip=0pt plus 1pt minus 0.1pt

(iii) please check if the right hyphenation file is used when 'greek' is invoked through Babel (xu-grahyph4.tex and not Modern Greek versions).

Nikola Lečić


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