Soft hyphenation

[ninjagame]

While I'm very happy with NWP in general, I'm kind of reluctant to bring the subject up again: Is there any chance to have a "soft hyphenation" some day? Writing in German, such a feature would be much appreciated since the automatic (?) hyphenation tends to produce some weird results I'd like to be able to correct or override somehow.

[steintal]

I can only support this feature request. I am a teacher writing a non commercial school book for students learning German.

Hans Schäppi

[greenmorpher]

I'll support that. This is needed in English too.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, now at the new low price of $29.95. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.

[Elbrecht]

Again -

anyone please read this paper on soft hyphen [shy] first:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html
...would be a hack - again!

HE

[Groucho]

Oh, my! All that bulky Megillah for a tiny hyphen!

Henry

[greenmorpher]

Hello Elbrecht

I have no interest in soft hyphens -- or hard ones for that matter -- for web work. The site you referred to provides the reason for that -- type set left, ragged right, no hyphens! That's the way to go for web.

I am thinking of print output with justified type where you might need to break a longer word or you might not, and that break might not be in your hyphenation dictionary. So you put in a soft hyphen and when it needs to break -- for example, when the type column narrows to flow around an illustration, it breaks on the soft hyphen.

I don't need a lot of imagination to realize that this need could be more frequent in German than in English.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, now at the new low price of $29.95. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.

[Elbrecht]

Geoff -

problem is, this would be a hack. That's why to read the paper on [shy]. You will have to hack the app and/or the font concerned to get it done your way. BTW that's my way as well - but then again who's to hack our way? I customized a font and it works in my app - but it's a hack. With all compatibility gone!

HE

[Elbrecht]

Geoff -

the problem of soft hyphen [SHY] pops up from time to time, as [SHY] should do! - so we had this a couple of times before. I just got back to an old document I had an argument with Andrew Stone with years before - and yeah Stone's Create seems now to be able to handle it right. Anyone to agree? Lucida Grande does the job with me.

Point is 1) [SHY] U+00AD should only display when the line actually breaks and 2) else should fallback to zero-width, when not actually breaking - within the lines. And 3) [SHY] should override any regular hyphenation rule for the word concerned, in order not to get it all mixed up!

I wonder is this a Leopard feature not documented/read about? But why does TextEdit/Nisus Writer not show the break at end of line then? It stays zero-width whereever in the line - not popping up at line break...

As Andrew's Create is a LinkBack partner Nisus should be able to cope with too...

HE

PS: "UnicodeChecker" from "http://earthlingsoft.net" will help at your "Services"!

[Elbrecht]

Wonder -

over wonder - soft hyphenation [SHY] even seems to work in Nisus Writer Pro. Enter U+00AD & Convert and Allow Hyphenation - then play with the Lucida Grande font size!!!

How Nice!
HE