[XeTeX] Hyphenation of strings of more than 63 characters

[Jonathan Kew]

Peter,

I have just pushed a new experimental branch named "max-hyph-len" to the 
xetex repository. The changes here implement a new integer parameter

   \XeTeXhyphenatablelength

which defaults to 63 (to maintain existing behavior), but can be 
increased to allow longer words to be hyphenated. (It can also be made 
smaller, but I doubt that's actually useful!)

There's a compile-time limit of 4095; you can set the parameter larger 
than this, but the value actually used will remain clamped to this 
limit. That should be enough for your purposes, I hope!

The values used for \lefthyphenmin and \righthyphenmin remain clamped to 63.

If you (and others) could build and test this version, to check that I 
haven't broken things, that would be great. I've successfully hyphenated 
a couple of really long strings in a test file, but it's had only 
minimal exercise so far!

Note that xetex.fmt (and any other .fmt files) will need to be rebuilt 
with the new version.

It will identify itself as version 0.99996.

JK

On 18/3/16 08:43, Peter Mukunda Pasedach wrote:
> I eventually managed to build xetex (on Ubuntu 14.04, with a TeX Live
> 2015 installation kept up to date) by cloning the xetex sources from
> sourceforge, then modified, as an experiment, xetex.web, replacing 63
> by 1023 in the places that seemed relevant, only guessing which ones
> they were, noticed that there's also small_number which is 63, which
> might play a role, but I didn't touch it. Also tex.ch needed to be
> adjusted to these changes. I had to install a few buildtools and
> libraries until it would build (by running the build.sh script), after
> some time I had a binary xetex in the build directory which after
> backing up the one from my regular texlive installation I copied into
> its place. Then `fmtutil --all`. After that I noticed that also
> xdvipdfmx needed to be replaced, so I followed the procedure here
> https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/tlbuild.html#Build-one-package backed
> up xdvipdfmx and replaced it with the new one. After that xelatex
> works with simple files, but once I try a file with strings longer
> than 63 characters it segfaults at the first of these, well, maybe
> that was to be expected...
>
> Peter
>
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Jonathan Kew wrote:
>>
>>> I'll try to get an experimental patch ready shortly. Or, of course,
>>> someone else is welcome to try. I don't think it's very hard, but it is
>>> more than just a single number.
>>
>> I have never attempted to modify *TeX since it ceased to be compiled as
>> Pascal (a language which I liked and understood -- the complete opposite
>> of my non-relationship with C); what is involved in compiling *TeX these
>> days, with particular reference to compiling for the Windows platform ?
>>
>> Philip Taylor
>>
>>
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