Thread: Should I use *soft hyphens to hyphenate large words
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Old 12-31-2013, 04:20 AM   #3
Hitch
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tex2002ans View Post
You are using the PHP tag, instead of the CODE tag.



I wouldn't recommend it at all.

I know that this soft hyphen question has come up before (and OF COURSE when I do a search I can't find exactly what I was looking for), but here are a few topics showing off what might happen when soft hyphens go wrong:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28108

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28139

Those devices that don't have the soft hyphen included in their character sets will usually show up as a ? or a blank box. This will ruin the reading experience.

The soft hyphen can also mess up searching in some cases, and/or interfere with the hyphenation algorithm (if the device has its own built-in hyphenation).

I would just leave justification/hyphenation up to the device itself. Those devices that do not include hyphenation (almost all older ereaders), and/or crappy justification algorithms... that is just too bad.
For the love of heaven, stay away from the soft-hyphen. It will lose you more readers than it shall gain, and the manual labor you're talking about is MASSIVE.

Hitch
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