Quote:
Originally Posted by Abecedary
And that's not even mentioning that you're not having a machine solve the problem, which is what this is supposedly taking care of.
I find the thought of inserting at least 5 extra characters ('*') into every single multisyllabic word to be a ridiculously poor way of handling the problem. For one, it would make the HTML nearly unreadable due to the number of extra markups involved (not exactly a huge problem, but one that could certainly be a major nuisance to some). And let's not even think about what it would do to the filesizes.
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Well... at least it shifts the weight of the document's typographic preparation where it belongs: the bookmaker's shoulders.
Even if genuinely solving the hyphenation problem was possible and practical, would all eBook readers include all hyphenation patterns for all languages?
All popular languages.
All less popular languages.
All languages that have no states attached to them? (Or at least the ones with more speakers than some of the world's smaller countries.)
... and, of course, some of these languages will be such that they will have words whose meaning, and therefore correct hyphenation, depends entirely on the semantic context. Which takes us to the eBook reading software having to try to at least figure out the grammar for X number of languages (where X might be very large indeed).
The truth is, it would be easier (and quite possibly achievable with remarkably high degree of accuracy) to have eBook readers replace dumb quotes with smart quotes in ePubs on the run... But I don't see that ever happening. And until it does, or something very like it is successfully implemented, I find it difficult to take seriously any suggestion that eBook readers will ever even try to hyphenate in a way that has any chance of producing correct hyphenation for a genuinely large percentage of all eBooks (regardless of language).
But, of course, I do not believe it is possibel for them to actually succeed, even if they do try.
- Ahi