Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
I think we have discussed it before here. TeX do not do it unless you force it to do it.
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But it does break at hyphens, it just uses a different configuration (\exhyphenpenalty, if I remember correctly).
Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
In Swedish we use spaces around emdashes. In TeX I prefer to put a thin space before and after an emdash. Breaking a line at an emdash seems to me to be bad typography. It is something that stands out and will attract attention.
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When typesetting a book that will be printed or "fixed" as PDF. There's many things you can try to tweak and avoid. Yes, avoiding breaks at explicit hyphens, dashes, even after the word "I", is desirable. But with a reflowable text in a small screen, you cannot be as demanding as with a printed book (yet). I prefer a break at a dash (which, by the way, I don't perceive as much distracting) over an underfull line or a paragraph full of hypenated breaks.
As you suggest, though, there is a problem with different typographic conventions in different languages. In Spanish, for instance, dashes are used like parentheses: with a space on the "outside" and no space on "inside". Breaking the line at the space is quite right, but breaking it between the dash and the inner word would be plain wrong. Fortunately, the current behaviour on the Cybook is fine for this. In English, I prefer to create my books with "space en-dash space" instead of "em-dash" (as I've seen done in some printed books too), that way I let the reader break the line at the dash and, at the same time the dash is a bit shorter... but I would prefer to have breaking zero-width spaces around an em-dash.