[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Well, sometimes I like to beat a dead horse.

Well, I guess you can call me a neigh-sayer, then.

This also doesn't get into the insanities of hyphenation.... different languages/countries have different typographical rules/conventions (you probably don't know German or Greek hyphenation rules for example). There are even differences between UK, US, and Austrailian hyphenation.

Okay, but what you're concerned about here (the language of the text, and whatever rules of hyphenation that that language, or country of origin, might have) are pretty much irrelevant for what I was trying to accomplish. What I was doing had nothing to do with the rules of hyphenation, but rather I was simply trying to minimize the occurrences of hyphenated words to only those places where it was most likely to be necessary, i.e. with larger/longer words.

Apart from that, I could care less if it hy-phenates or hyphen-ates, as long as it hyphenates the word "hyphenates", and doesn't gratuitously also hyphenate shorter words like "shor-ter", simply because it can (and because that word happens to fall at the end of a line).

There are people out there who have created giant hyphenation dictionaries to handle many words under the sun. Those that don't have specific rules, then typically they go by some sort of algorithm to split at certain prefixes/suffixes/roots. (For example, when it runs across someone's Last Name, or an obscure word, it needs to figure out how to hyphenate that (if needed)).

Kewl -- but again, like I've been saying, that's irrelevant (or at least inconsequential) for what I was trying to accomplish.

And all the other things that you mentioned in your previous post(s) are also irrelevant (or, again, at least inconsequential): font size, font face, margin size, page orientation... in my testing I found that there was only improvement of readability (by decreasing the number of hyphenated words), no marked increase in any sort of "disconcerting" white space between words, and overall nicer visual appeal from a typographic design perspective (as exemplified by that Word vs InDesign vs LaTex example you gave before, where one can see how "ugly" the Word example looks with all those gratuitous hyphenated words).

You can see what happens in this print book when I make an extremely minor adjustment to the negative indent in the footnote (if I remember correctly, I believe this was 1.2em (or 1.1?) to 1em?).

Well, as I keep getting reminded about by others, we're not talking about print here, so while I can certainly understand and appreciate the examples you provided (and I've run into similar problems while working with print -- or PDF -- docs, too), I'm not sure how any of that applies, in particular to the subject matter at hand.

I will save this post... once you go down your hyphenation-crazy nitpicking path for a few months/years, you will see... you will see!

I'm saving it, too -- so that if, down the road, the general concensus becomes that I had it right in the first place, then I can actually prove it when I say "Ha ha, told ya so!"

Hmmm... were we ever wrong? I mean, we were right about letting fonts do all the fancy footwork! Now go back and read your old topic, you are probably going to think "Who is that crazy guy? Oh wait, his username was Psymon!"

Well, that's why I gave in and conceded defeat on this so easily, because I've put my faith in you (you all) that you're more experienced than I am, and that I should trust that you know what you're talking about better than I do.

But that doesn't mean that I've thrown out the window the really rather simple and obvious logic behind what I was trying to accomplish, and the fact that in my experience -- including quite a bit of testing, going through my previous books page-by-page (from beginning to end), at different fonts sizes and orientations -- what I was endeavouring to do came out not just successfully, but quite beautifully, quite "elegantly" (as I said in the subject heading for this thread), without any problems at all.

And despite my success, my trust and faith in you apparently has me effectively doubting my own experience, disbelieving what I've seen with my own eyes, and conceding to just up and give it up, and go back and undo what all I've done before.

So yes, save these posts -- because I'm going to, too.