Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
The problem is that yes, proper soft hyphen support can be added. But there are going to be devices and people using older software versions. So it's never going to be fixed in a way that soft hyphens will work for everyone.
For example, anyone still using a Sony Reader will not have working soft hyphens and there's no way at all to fix this.
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Right - but there are readers now that do not have automated hyphenation but do properly support soft hyphenation.
The calibre reader I use on Linux - maybe there is a plugin that does it, but when I right click on an ePub and choose "Open with E-Book Viewer" there is no automated hyphenation, but if I add soft-hyphens they are used.
So should I refrain from fixing the display of ePub documents on readers that *do* support soft hyphens just because some readers do not have U+00AD or should I go ahead and include the soft hyphens for the benefit of those using compatible readers and also include a font that has U+00AD so that users of devices w/o that glyph will at least get the proper zero width glyph instead of a ? glyph?
And yes, I know soft hyphens break search on some devices. Users of those devices should complain to the manufacturer, they paid money for an ePub reader and they got one with a very nasty bug. If I cater to that bug, then I can not deliver as good of a product to those using devices / software without a bug.
And while searching for info on ePub hyphenation, it seems the automated hyphenation for Polish is often extremely bad - Polish books should either disable hyphenation all together or only use soft hyphenation until the automated hyphenation is fixed.
When we develop to bugs instead of the standard, the consumer loses.
Bugs are reality and have to be worked around, but not at the expense of producing an inferior product for those without blatantly defective readers.
In my
opinion.