[XeTeX] buggy hyphenation in XeTeX?

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Sat Apr 14 12:58:20 CEST 2007


On 14 Apr 2007, at 12:49 am, Pablo Rodríguez wrote:

> I'm using xetex-0.995 (probably from the SVN directory) and I don't  
> know
> whether I have found a bug with hyphenation. See the following  
> document:
>
> \documentclass[a4paper,12pt,draft]{article}
> \usepackage[spanish]{babel}
> \usepackage{fontspec}
> \setromanfont{Old Standard}
> \righthyphenmin=2\lefthyphenmin=2
> \begin{document}
> \begin{quotation}
> Martin Heidegger, filósofo alemán, se sitúa ante nosotros como
> pensador que declaró el final de la metafísica. Denunció el olvido del
> ser y apuntó a un nuevo comienzo, más atrás de los orígenes (aunque
> esto no se haya de entender en sentido cronológico). Se trata de un
> filósofo que puso de relieve la centralidad de la
> \end{quotation}
> \end{document}
>
> (Old Standard is located at
> http://www.thessalonica.org.ru/en/fonts.html.) For some strange reason
> "como" (in the first line) will not be hyphenated (even if you add a
> letter to the previous word). I guess this is a bug. Has it been fixed
> in version 0.996?

Running your example with my current development version  
(post-0.996), I get hyphenation of "co-mo".

One thing to consider is that by default, TeX prefers to avoid  
hyphenation if possible, so even if there's a potential hyphenation  
point, it may not be used if the lines can be broken reasonably well  
without it. To make hyphenation much more likely (on a temporary  
basis), you could try adding

   \pretolerance = -1 % always run the hyphenation pass
   \hyphenpenalty = -1000 % breaks at hyphenation points are highly  
desirable

Running your sample with these settings, I get hyphenation on *every*  
line! :)

If you still don't see the expected hyphenation with these settings,  
I think something is misconfigured in your installation. My current  
recommendation would be to use one of the TeX Live-based packages  
(either TL2007 itself, or a redistribution based on it).

JK



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