[XeTeX] [tex-live] last-minute update to xetex?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 20/3/16 15:03, Philip Taylor wrote:
 >
 >
 > Jonathan Kew wrote:
 >
 >> I have just proposed a change (it's currently on a sourceforge branch,
 >> but could be merged to master at any time) to make the max hyphenatable
 >> word length user-adjustable. The default remains 63 chars (for stability
 >> of existing documents), but I've added a parameter
 >> \XeTeXhyphenatablelength that can be adjusted by the author (there's a
 >> hard limit of 4K, which should be enough for the foreseeable future...)
 >
 > I notice that no warning is given if this limit is exceeded, Jonathan :
 >
 >> \uselanguage {sanskrit}
 >>
 >> \font \mainfont = "Latin Modern Roman"
 >> \mainfont
 >> \XeTeXhyphenatablelength = \maxdimen
 >> \raggedright
 >> \parindent = 0 pt
 >> \parskip = 1 ex
 >
 > Do you think that the user might usefully be warned in such 
circumstances ?
 >
 > Philip Taylor
 >

I considered that, but I don't think it's worth it.

This is analogous to how TeX's standard \left- and \righthyphenmin work: 
they're just integer parameters, you can set them as large as you like 
with no complaint from TeX (well, I suppose there's a 32-bit integer 
limit or something...), and reading them back will give you the value 
you specified, but internally they're clamped to the range 0..63 when 
they're used, and setting them larger won't make any difference.

This kind of behavior is typical of TeX's integer parameters. Setting 
\tolerance=9999999 is valid and generates no warning, even though it 
won't behave any differently from \tolerance=10000 as far as TeX is 
concerned.

JK