> Would \savinghyphcodes help? According to the documentation of > e-TeX, setting this parameter to a positive value would save the > \lccodevalues in effect during the execution of \patterns and e-TeX (so also > XeTeX and LuaTeX) would use those "frozen" values for hyphenation > purposes.
I add the result of a small experiment. I copied a version of loadhyph-it.tex renaming it to hyphen.tex and modifying it thus: BEFORE: \begingroup \lccode`\'=`\' % ASCII patterns - no additional support is needed \message{ASCII Italian Hyphenation Patterns} \input hyph-it.tex \endgroup AFTER: \begingroup \savinghyphcodes=1 \lccode`\'=`\' \lccode"2019=`\' % ASCII patterns - no additional support is needed \message{ASCII Italian Hyphenation Patterns} \input hyph-it.tex \endgroup I ran "xetex -jobname myxetex -ini -etex plain" getting myxetex.fmt in the current directory. Then I prepared the following test file: === test.tex === \font\1="TeX Gyre Pagella/ICU:script=latn;language=DFLT;mapping=tex-text;" \1 \lccode"2019="2019 \hsize=3pt \noindent a dell'amicizia \bye === Then I ran xetex by "xetex -fmt myxetex test" and this was the result on the terminal: === terminal output === This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9997.4 (TeX Live 2010) restricted \write18 enabled. entering extended mode (./test.tex Overfull \hbox (2.0pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 9--10 \1 a| Overfull \hbox (14.14pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 9--10 \1 del-| Overfull \hbox (11.02pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 9--10 \1 l’a-| Overfull \hbox (12.07pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 9--10 \1 mi-| Overfull \hbox (7.68001pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 9--10 \1 ci-| Overfull \hbox (9.91pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 9--10 \1 zia | [1] ) (see the transcript file for additional information) Output written on test.pdf (1 page). Transcript written on test.log. === Note that the apostrophe in the input has been translated into right quote (U+2019) as requested by the mapping file, but nevertheless the hyphenation was correct. Commenting out the \lccode"2019="2019 line, the word was not hyphenated (which is correct, since in "naked" plain TeX the lccode is 0). I used Italian, since the French pattern file contains proper UTF-8 characters and it's necessary to initialize the lccode table for them. But the experiment seems to prove that this works. Alas, it doesn't in LuaTeX, because I read that \savinghyphcodes is not enabled in the current version (but it should be in 0.70, according to Taco Hoekwater). Ciao Enrico -- Enrico Gregorio + Dipartimento di Informatica + Tel: +39 045 8027937 enrico.grego...@univr.it + Università degli Studi di Verona + (grego...@math.unipd.it) + Strada le Grazie 15 / I-37134 Verona + Fax: +39 045 8027928 -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex