[XeTeX] hyphenation in Ethiopian languages

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 May 2011, at 18:02, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:

>> And another nasty issue (that might deserve its own thread). We wanted
>> to have no hyphenchar at all, but using \hyphenchar\font=0 has a nasty
>> consequence that lines with broken words are not properly justified
>> (some extra space is squeezed between the last character in line and
>> the non-existent hyphen char).
> 
>  Actually, what we've observed is that XeTeX seems to produce a glyph
> in the output even if we set \hyphenchar to a character for which there
> is no glyph in the current font.

That doesn't surprise me; I'd expect you to get the font's .notdef glyph (which might be a blank space, as in this example, or a box, or some other symbol). What you want is a character that has a zero-width, invisible glyph; if the font supports any of the Unicode characters such as ZWNBSP or ZWNJ or WJ or CGJ, etc., that ought to work. Or character 13 (CR) is a likely bet, too.

JK