[XeTeX] Strange hyphenation with polyglossia in French

[Jonathan Kew]

On 16 Oct 2010, at 12:42, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> 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 ...

Would setting

  \lccode "2019 = "27

be any help?

Of course, this could have undesired side-effects if you apply \lowercase{...} to text containing Unicode ’ characters, so it's probably not a good general-purpose solution.

JK