Koreader and dashes

[Lukusaukko]

I've been reading a book that makes an extensive use of em dashes, and Koreader often ends up rendering the em dash in the beginning of a line, which is kind of ugly, and in hardcopy the usual rule is to never begin a line with a dash. Is there any way to force it to keep the dash at the end of the line, or failing that, take the preciding word with it to the next line (the em dashes are without surrounding space)?

[Frenzie]

Probably not, but perhaps it'll pique poire-z's interest after coming back from vacation.

[Moonbase59]

Well, you could modify your ebook to use a ZWJ (zero-width joiner; U+200D) at the left of the emdash, but that would probably be a bit too much…

In German, which uses blank-endash-blank, this is also often a problem, but can be avoided by typesetting NBSP (no-break space; U+00A0), endash, space.

Both variants should keep the dash together with the word, preventing dashes at line beginnings (except where intended).

[Lukusaukko]

Originally Posted by Moonbase59

Well, you could modify your ebook to use a ZWJ (zero-width joiner; U+200D) at the left of the emdash, but that would probably be a bit too much…

That sounds interesting, I was not aware such a thing existed. When looking into it in Calibre's editor, I also noticed there is also a word joiner (U+2060) which also seems to work for the same purpose, though it has one caveat: when the dash is attached to the preciding word with WJ, the editor thinks it's a spelling mistake, whilst ZWJ passes.

It's a bit hackish I suppose, since it involves inserting invisible control characters into the text, but if it's not possible to change the way Koreader renders dashes, it's one possible solution... at least for extreme cases of dash usage.

[Moonbase59]

Originally Posted by Lukusaukko

That sounds interesting, I was not aware such a thing existed.

Indeed Unicode gives us not only most of the world’s character sets, but also real good possibilities for good typesetting and microtypography. Wikipedia has some interesting articles about these special characters and their usage.

I only wished that publishers, who once really cared about well-typeset books, would care as much for good digital typesetting. Most of today’s ebooks are automated digital junk, no craftsmanship anymore. Sigh.