Greetings hyphenation experts... I'm trying to get xetex to accept some very very alpha hypenation patterns for the internaltional Romani alphabet. It seems to get more complex the more I look at it. This is basicaly a latin script with diacritics to mark stress and unusual vowels, θ, ʒ for some cross dialect morpho-phonemic skulduggery and (to mark vocatives) mid-word exclamation points. This latter is my current source of pain.
The position of the exclamation mark can be before or after the vowel,(e.g. "rromál!len", or "grást!a"). so sometimes it is a good hyphenation point, but not always. At the moment initex is moaning about non-letters in the hyphenation pattern. I presume I need to change the catcode of ! to solve that - would that be in the hypenation file, or somewhere else? But also, is it possible for XeTeX to count ! as a letter when mid-word and punctuation (so that the spacing rules work) word finally? Would I need to make it active and do something clever, and if it is active, does that break hyphenation? David
