[XeTeX] Strange hyphenation with polyglossia in French

[Arthur Reutenauer]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 12:10:32AM +0200, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> They're presumingly pdfTeX users.

  No.  Many users still use the ASCII quote in their documents (U+0027).
I see examples of that all the time, for instance (but it's really only
one example, among many others), in the e-mail I'm replying to.

>                                   With LuaTeX and XeTeX, and that's  
> probably the target of UTF-8 based hyphenation files

  Not at all.  The target for Unicode-based hyphenation patterns are
*all* TeX engines.  Patterns are converted on the fly for 8-bit TeX
engines.  Having a system that works for all the variants without
duplicating files was a prerequisite.

>                             And I've actually forgotten how to write 
> typographic quotes the complicated way.

  If you mean typing two single straight quotes (U+0027) to get the
usual reprentative glyph for the closing double quote (U+201D), it
really has nothing to do with the problem at hand.

> Which side effect(s) has making the ASCII quotes be typographic quotes?

  The one Jonathan mentions, to start with.

	Arthur