Why won't the Kindle do proper full justification?

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Mike L

One thing that publishers, editors or authors could do is to insert a space on either side of a dash. Most often, they represent a dash by two consecutive hyphens, with no space between the hyphens and words. The software then interprets the word on each side, plus the hyphens themselves, as a single word, which then gets pushed to the next line.

As an example:

He set out on the long journey to the outpatients department.
He decided to take his
umbrella--recognising that it would 
rain--together with a flask of hot coffee and a muffin.

Do you see what I mean? "umbrella--recognising" is treated as a single word, as is "rain--together", resulting in ragged text. A space on either side of each "--" would have fixed that.

Actually you can put in the HTML entity ‌ (zero-width non joiner) to the right of a hyphen or m-dash or whatever and Kindle will break the line there if it needs to. This won't affect the visual appearance like inserting spaces will, and doesn't appear to affect text search behavior.

Of course, they should fix Kindle so that these breaks can occur automatically. The logic is of not doing so is not at all obvious. The ePub readers I've used will line-break at hyphens, m-dashes, etc., and don't otherwise support hyphenation.

[addheat]

neither kindlegen or calibre produced mobi are free from this problem. so it's machine-related issues. anyone write up to amazon?