[XeTeX] Strange hyphenation with polyglossia in French

[enrico.gregorio at univr.it]

> 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 \savinghyphcodes help? According to the documentation of
e-TeX, setting this parameter to a positive value would save the \lccode
values in effect during the execution of \patterns and e-TeX (so also
XeTeX and LuaTeX) would use those "frozen" values for hyphenation
purposes.

This would avoid the need of changing the \lccode of any character as
part of babel or polyglossia modules, Setting \lccode"2019=`\' and
\lccode`\'=`\' when French or Italian patterns are read in should also
avoid the need of pattern duplication. It is a problem also for Catalan
and some other languages,

Of course this can't be used in regular knuthian TeX, but it shouldn't be
an issue, since we are discussing about Unicode input.

Ciao
Enrico

--
Enrico Gregorio          + Dipartimento di Informatica          + Tel: +39 045 8027937
Enrico.Gregorio at univr.it + Università degli Studi di Verona     +
(gregorio at math.unipd.it) + Strada le Grazie 15 / I-37134 Verona + Fax: +39 045 8027928