6

What exactly does the package showhyphens tell us about hyphenation points? According to its documentation, it "will show all possible hyphenation points".

But when the word contains a ligature, it will not only fail to tell us that there's a hyphenation point between the two characters of the ligature (presumably because the ligature is a single glyph in the .pdf), but it will also erroneously report that there's a hyphenation point elsewhere in the word that's not actually there.

Is there any way to get showhyphens to report the actual hyphenation breaks in words with ligatures?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{showhyphens}
\begin{document}
office \parbox{0pt}{\hspace{0pt}office}
\end{document}

enter image description here

Sverre
  • 20,729

1 Answers1

6

The limitation of the package is what you have found out, it should be documented.

While it is possible to look inside the ffi ligature and find out where the original hyphen character was placed (between the first f and the following component fi), it is very hard to draw the line indicating the hyphenation point correctly. The ffi ligature is one opaque rectancgle. Drawing a line at the correct position is pure luck, and therefore out of the scope of the package.

The next update of the package will have a comment on the ligatures and it's limitation.

topskip
  • 37,020