[XeTeX] add \hyphenateminwordsize

[Élie Roux]

Dear XeTeX developers,

In many languages, small words shouldn't be hyphenated, and this is not
always possible with \left/righthyphenmin. For instance, many languages
(Spanish for example) don't want to hyphenate words of 4 letters or
less, but still having \left/righthyphenmin = 2.

Example of the desired hyphenation: "come" (no hyphen), "co-mi-da".

If \left/righthyphenmin == 2, this will hyphen "co-me" (which is not the
desired behavior), and with \left/righthyphemin == 3, it will not hyphen
"comida".

Currently it doesn't seem possible to have the desired behaviour. The
request would be to add \hyphenateminwordsize, that would set the
minimal character length of a word to be hyphenated. In the example,
having \hyphenateminwordsize = 4 and \left/righthyphenmin = 2 would make
the right output.

LibreOffice has a similar option, and LuaTeX will certainly add it:

http://tracker.luatex.org/view.php?id=930

Apparently the patch is not very intrusive. What do you think about
adding it?

Thank you,
-- 
Elie