[XeTeX] Broken Hyphenation

[Jonathan Kew]

On 25 Feb 2007, at 2:21 pm, Pascal de Bruijn wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The previously outlined issues seems to be caused by broken  
> hyphenation
> files, the hungarian and serbian hyphenation files seem broken, or at
> least fmtutil can't cope with them.

xetex can't cope with them because of the legacy 8-bit (non-Unicode)  
encodings used. The simplest solution is to disable those languages  
in language.dat (assuming you don't actually need them).

(The packages on the xetex site were built for Dapper, not Edgy, so  
it's not surprising there may be some issues to work around.)

> It also seems my tetex install on Edgy isn't up to date enough:
> LaTeX Warning: You have requested, on input line 39, version
>                `2005/05/07' of package xkeyval,
>                but only version
>                `2005/01/30 v2.0 package option processing (HA)'
>                is available.
>
> XeLaTeX also seems to 'break' the geometry package which I use to
> specify a custom paper size.

There's a geometry.cfg file for xetex that should make it work, but I  
suspect the installation on Edgy didn't put the xetex-specific texmf  
additions in places where the Edgy TeX configuration finds them. If  
you locate the .cfg file from the xetex package and ensure xelatex is  
using it, then geometry should work.

>
> And how is inclusion into TeXlive 2006 coming along?

TeX Live 2007, now released (see http://tug.org/texlive, or CTAN),  
includes a more up-to-date XeTeX (for all architectures) than the  
existing Debian packages. This supersedes the packages currently on  
the separate xetex web site (which I will update when time permits).

As the TeX Live repackagers for Debian and other distributions begin  
to provide packages based on TL2007, you should find that xetex is  
already available as part of the standard installation. So for most  
situations, no separate xetex package should be needed.

The TeX Live release also provides a better solution to the  
hyphenation file encoding problems.

JK