# [tex-hyphen] Latin Hyphenation when using utf8

Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com
Wed Jun 23 09:29:36 CEST 2010

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 23:16, Andrew Gollan wrote:
> grātiās plūrimās vōbīs agō
>
> This almost completely solved my problem (though I confess I haven't looked
> through for nasty hyphenations yet). I ran xelatex on my input file with
> only a couple of minor mods for font handling:
> \usepackage{palatino} => \usepackage{fontspec}\setromanfont{Palatino
> Linotype}.
>
> But xelatex seems to just happily proceed when it doesn't have a glyph. In
> the old scheme I could put a macon on 'y' to make 'ȳ' and it came out in the
> wash even though the font did not directly contain it. My new book had gaps
> where the 'ȳ' should be. Any quick hints on how to understand/control glyph
> substitution in the brave new (to me) world of XeTeX?

You have a few options:

a) Use Gentium or some other complete font (I vote for that)

b) You could use TeX Gyre Pagella, but that font doesn't have ȳ
either, at least not yet; however, you may request that glyph at
Polish font gurus and then you'll have the support in all the fonts
they are covering (8 TeX Gyre families, Latin Modern, Antykwa
Torunska, Antykwa Poltawskiego, Iwona, Kurier, ...)

c) The following works in ConTeXt to make a fallback for a missing
glyph in the font:
\catcode\ȳ=\active
\defȳ{\buildtextaccent\textmacron y}
The same should work in plain TeX/LaTeX, but it must be some other
command (\accent or something ... maybe even \defȳ{\=y} works fine).

However, while the option "c" is "it always works", you'll get exactly
the same problems with hyphenation as in pdfTeX. So the best option is
to take the font that does have that glyph (or request its addition to
TeX fonts). You can do the "b" independent of whether you choose to go
with the first option for now.

> My first reaction would be just to say:
> amacron = abreve = a
> Amacron = Abreve = A
> ...

Sure. You just need a complete list. If what Arthur say is true (that
there's no more way to use \savehyphencodes or however it is spelled),
the easiest way to implement the patterns is to "duplicate" all the
patterns or rather: replace each patterns with all the possible
substitutions of "a" with abreve and amacron (all possible
combinations).

If you are able to buy or borrow the TeXBook, read appendix H. (For a
shortcut see pages 36-45 in
http://tug.org/tex-hyphen/pdf/hyphenator.pdf for a nice visual
explanation of how patterns work.)

Mojca

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