[sword-devel] Soft hyphens?

Eeli Kaikkonen eekaikko at mail.student.oulu.fi
Thu Apr 23 12:56:56 MST 2009


David Haslam wrote:
> Which SWORD frontends (if any) correctly handle the soft hyphen (U+00AD) to
> break up big words when necessary? 
> See  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen#Hyphens_in_computing
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen#Hyphens_in_computing 
> 
> "When flowing text, a system may consider the soft hyphen to be a point at
> which a word may be broken, and display a hyphen at the end of the broken
> line; if the line is not broken at that point the hyphen is not displayed."
> 
> -- David

Latest KHTML seems to support it and I guess therefore WebKit does, too. 
Konqueror just doesn't show the hyphen character when breaking a word to 
two lines, but it may be a font problem as well.

See http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shytest.html.

BTW, I have thought about using soft hyphens. They would raise the 
quality of the text display with narrow windows. E.g ancient Greek is 
known for long (inflected) words and it shouldn't be very hard to add 
hyphens programmatically.

--Eeli Kaikkonen



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