[XeTeX] Strange hyphenation with polyglossia in French

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 11:47, Cyril Niklaus wrote:
> Hello all,
> I'd never had (or noticed) that problem before, so I don't know if it's a new thing or something I do that does not comply. The problem is simple, hyphenation occurs between an apostrophe and the word it follows : l'information in my case becomes l'-information.
>
> I also noticed that including or not
> \defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}
> changes things quite a bit

Dear Cyril,

I'm in a rush now, so I cannot answer in too much extent, but what you
observe is a "known problem that needs a nice idea to solve it" (or we
can simply create and load another bunch of patterns) and it's present
in both XeTeX and LuaTeX (only that it's mapped to quotation mark in
LuaTeX). In 8-bit TeX every apostrophe looks like single quotation
mark, while in TeX this is not true any more: it depends on whether
you use tex-text or not. In one case you will get quotation mark, in
the other you will get apostrophe, and hyphenation rules are now aware
of that.

We would need to double all the hyphenation patterns to account for
that case (including both apostrophe and quotation marks). An
alternative would be to "explain to engine" that two characters
hyphenate in exactly the same way. The latter is possible, but we
never (managed to) implement it. It might be as simple as one line of
code though ...

Mojca


Mojca