[XeTeX] Hyphenation of strings of more than 63 characters

[Peter Mukunda Pasedach]

Dear Jonathan,

yes, recompiling xetex is fine!

At 255 characters I still have 32 occurences left, at 500 two, and at
1000 zero. Thanks for looking into this!

Peter

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Jonathan Kew <jfkthame at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15/3/16 14:24, Peter Mukunda Pasedach wrote:
>>
>> Dear XeTeX list,
>>
>> I am dealing with a collection of texts in Sanskrit, for which the
>> builtin limitation of TeX to not perform hyphenation after the 63rd
>> character of a string is imposing a serious limitation, as such
>> strings do occur. One reason for this is that one can freely form very
>> long compounds, another one is sandhi, in which due to euphonic
>> changes ending and beginning vowels fuse, another one that in Indic
>> scripts if one word ends in a consonant and the next one starts with a
>> vowel they are written together, another reason can be that scribes
>> simply do not use spaces consistently. Thus in the collection of texts
>> that I'm working on, currently comprising of 37 files, strings of more
>> than 63 characters occur 1823 times.
>>
>> Is this limitation of 63 characters just an odd remnant of the time
>> TeX was written in, then necessary because of hardware limitations, or
>> does it still make sense? Is there a reasonable way to remove it, or
>> set it significantly higher?
>
>
> I suspect (without actually checking the code) that it would be fairly
> trivial to make it significantly higher (less so to remove it entirely; but
> something like 255 or even 1000-plus would probably be simple).
>
> A change like this would need to be optional, however, so that the
> typesetting of existing documents does not change unless the user
> deliberately chooses the modified behavior.
>
> It's probably too late to be adding a new feature for the TL'16 release; are
> you prepared to recompile xetex yourself from source in order to make such a
> change?
>
> JK
>
>
>
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