Quote:
Originally Posted by WillAdams
Probably a better choice here is to forego hyphenation entirely and set everything FLRR (flush left, ragged right) --- certainly Sony's ebook viewing program wouldn't have some of the spacing issues which really irk me if it set things fully justified (FLFR).
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... but of course excessive raggedness is equally disturbing: a long line followed by a short one is every bit as bad as one with excessive internal spacing. Some balancing will be necessary. And there are quite a number of book designers who is not going to think 'ragged right' is anywhere close an acceptable solution.
Why not just bite the bullet, and accept that there are some difficult problems to solve in order to produce a good eBook. Hyphenation is one of them. It's not going to go away. A *good* eBook tool should really address the problem, and so of course such a solution will necessarily be on a wishlist for one. Not everything on a wishlist will be implemented, but at least it serves as a feature catalogue for the future.
Full XML-markup is a 'batch programmer's solution', correct as far as it goes, but economically impractical. No typesetter ever did anything like that -- they concentrated on visibly loose pages, and widows/orphans, and adjusted accordingly, worrying about 'full markup' only for those sentences that were candidates for end-of-line hyphenation points.
Without the help of a fixed page format, that isn't possible: all acceptable hyphenation points (and as I said, this depends on language: AmE and BrE do not have the same rules) must be applied, some must be inserted or inhibited on a house style basis, and some must be handled manually.
What the book formatter needs is the support for his job. That includes the choice of deciding himself whether to do ragged or flush setting, as well as the tools for doing either up the standards of his profession. As I said: support every feature of the *reader*software*. If it does both flush and ragged setting, the book tool should support both features. If flush gets ugly because the book formatter has to insert hyphenation points manually, then he's not using a supporting tool, but merely an enabling tool. And we have quite enough of those.
I repeat: *support* every feature of the reading software. Not just enable them, and leave the book format person to sort out the mess as best as he can.
There, I've said my part.