Soft Hyphens

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Ankh

Automated hyphenation might be decently implemented for English language, but I doubt that the same is true for myriad of living (and dead ?) languages.

In the future, a professional hyphenation tool (based on OED database?) might emerge that will do a better job than the automated process. If the author wants to invest effort to fix hyphenation (or to purposely tweak it), why not allow them to do so?

IMHO, the automated hyphenation should be clever enough to shut itself off when soft hyphen characters are present in the source of the word at the edge of the screen.

Because in a reflowable format the author cannot know which words to hyphenate in advance, which means she has to hyphenate *all* the words. I can't imagine any human being sitting and doing that.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Because in a reflowable format the author cannot know which words to hyphenate in advance, which means she has to hyphenate *all* the words.

Agreed. All words. Storage is cheap, and the size of publication is very-very-very low on my list of concerns.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I can't imagine any human being sitting and doing that.

Neither can I. What I can imagine, though, is human "providing assistance" to the automated hyphenation tool, for a limited number of words that such a tool does not know how to hyphenate. Even that limited intervention can produce better result than the automated tool built into the dedicated reader.

If the author (or the person doing the layout, no difference) is keen to pursue such a perfection, why not let them?

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Ankh

If the author (or the person doing the layout, no difference) is keen to pursue such a perfection, why not let them?

Umm what's stopping them?

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Umm what's stopping them?

Buggy implementation of soft hyphenation in the ADE 1.71, I would guess.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Ankh

Buggy implementation of soft hyphenation in the ADE 1.71, I would guess.

Ah, well I'm user Adobe will get around to it someday

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Ah, well I'm user Adobe will get around to it someday

With all due respect, no, you are not just a "user". You are the author of the the best ePub viewer that runs natively on my Linux box.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Ankh

With all due respect, no, you are not just a "user". You are the author of the the best ePub viewer that runs natively on my Linux box.

Actually I meant user=sure

Incidentally calibre's ebook-viewer respects soft hyphens but because of a bug in Qt, the soft hyphens at line endings are not actually rendered. The viewer even uses language sesnitive algorithms to do hyphenation (if you turn it on in the Preferences)

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Incidentally calibre's ebook-viewer respects soft hyphens but because of a bug in Qt, the soft hyphens at line endings are not actually rendered.

Thanks for the info, that particular lack of hyphen glyphs was a mystery.

The strange thing was that calibre viewer (when it comes to the treatment of soft hyphens) is behaving same as ADE 1.71, and there should be no Qt dependencies there, unless I am mistaken.

[wallcraft]

Referring back to the start of the thread, shytest.epub now renders the same using mobile ADE (Sony eBook Library 3.0 and Hanlin V3) as Windows ADE, i.e. it breaks on a soft hyphen, but does not add a "-" when it does so.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

The attached ebooks are based on http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shytest.html, which is from Soft hyphen (SHY) – a hard problem?. I enclose a single-file HTML (ZIP), MOBI (via MobiPocket Creator) and ePub (via BookGlutton) versions.

In the ePUB, I see all soft hyphens encoded as & #xAD;

This is the "fixed" file. Opera 10 seems to render it it fine, but Prince does not display the hyphen when it occurs at a manual linebreak (<br/>).

[naskotop]

Hyphenation is a visual must. Giving the reader an ugly justified blocks of text to read is as cruel as having spelling mistakes. Being incapable of providing an algorithm working on the hardware (although it is not a rocket science) it is an unexplainable shame not to provide any correct visualisation of the embedded soft hyphens. There are many programs that can process a text as an input and produce a soft-hyphened text as an output. Nobody is going to do it manually - we are not in the stone age...

[DSpider]

I think InDesign can do it automatically (dictionary-based, I think. So if you want Swahili or something, tough luck). Basically you ouput to ePub and convert the ePub to Mobi (eg. using Calibre).

PS: Bumping a 3 yo thread isn't a very good practice. It's called necroposting.

[naskotop]

[QUOTE=DSpider;2111459 Bumping a 3 yo thread isn't a very good practice. It's called necroposting.[/QUOTE]
The astonishing thing is that in 3 years nothing has changed about hyphenation. Do you think it is so difficult to have the support of the ­ in any e-reader and to allow the providers of the content to do their best...?

If you are not interested on this subject, please do not feel obliged to answer any comment...

[naskotop]

... the support of the & s h y ; in any e-reader...

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by naskotop

The astonishing thing is that in 3 years nothing has changed about hyphenation.

Really? When was ADE 1.8 (preview) released? It includes hyphenation, and some dedicated readers (mine, for instance) support it.