[XeTeX] Hyphenation of strings of more than 63 characters

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15/3/16 18:04, Doug McKenna wrote:
> There could be some subtle problems that simply changing the character count constant causes.
>
> In particular, the allocation size of a "whatsit" language node might also need changing, which would require adjusting other code in the core engine that assumes a default small size for that language node sub-type of a "whatsit".
>
> Or not.  I can't tell from the TeX source what the bit sizes of these node fields are.  But if they're too small to fit a pair of enhanced character count limits for hyphenation, there will likely be bugs elsewhere due to truncation or wraparound in the arithmetic.
>
> FWIW,
>
> Doug McKenna
>


AFAICS, this would only become an issue if we allow \lefthyphenmin and 
\righthyphenmin to be given larger values; currently, they're limited to 
the range 0..63 (actually, it's possible to set the parameters to larger 
values, but they'll be clamped when stored in a language node).

But I don't think that's needed here; surely there's no realistic 
use-case that requires setting the *-min values greater than 63, even 
when hyphenating 1000-letter Sanskrit words.

JK