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 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Mukunda Pasedach" <peter.pased...@googlemail.com> To: "XeTeX (Unicode-based TeX) discussion." <xetex@tug.org> Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2016 9:13:08 AM Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Hyphenation of strings of more than 63 characters 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 <jfkth...@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 > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
