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Old 04-24-2017, 12:57 PM   #1
guerrilla
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Kindle Automatic Hyphenation
Could somebody point me to a technical explaination of how the automatic hyphenation that amazon introduced a while ago works?
I understand it only works with ebooks that support it, so how is it automatic?
Does it rely on soft hyphens or something? But that was already possible. Maybe the last firmwares have better soft hyphen support?

I'd like to buy an ereader for my brother's birthday and I'm not sure between Kindle PW and Tolino Vision 3/4 HD.
You can't beat Amazon customer care, but Kindle's lack of choice when it comes to margins (large, extra large and ridiculously large), line height, font size, etc. really bothers me (I think I couldn't live without koreader on my PW). So if at least the hyphenation thing was solved...

TIA.
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Old 04-24-2017, 05:03 PM   #2
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Amazon considers the workings of their Kindle software to be proprietary. There is no technical documentation. (EDIT: Oops, actually I just came across some technical documentation from Amazon for Ion - the underlying data format used by KFX. Posted in the KFX thread in the Kindle Formats forum.)

Automatic hyphenation is part of Enhanced Typesetting (link). The product description of books sold by Amazon indicates whether Enhanced Typesetting is supported for each book.

It has been discovered that Enhanced Typesetting is only available for books in the undocumented KFX format (link). It is also known that the KFX rendering software uses a hyphenation dictionary instead of soft hyphens.
Last edited by jhowell; 04-25-2017 at 08:02 AM.
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Old 04-24-2017, 10:54 PM   #3
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(According to the KFX wiki here it does involve soft-hyphens. But that computation is done in the cloud with language-specific hyphenation dictionaries.

If you transfer via USB, I believe you get .azw3 file (i.e., no enhanced typography).
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Old 04-25-2017, 08:07 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem View Post
According to the KFX wiki here it does involve soft-hyphens.
I disagree with whoever wrote that in the wiki. That was early speculation, since disproved.

The original post also mentioned koreader. As far as I know that doesn't support KFX. I don't know whether or not it supports hyphenation some other way.
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Old 04-25-2017, 03:22 PM   #5
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Originally Posted by jhowell View Post
I disagree with whoever wrote that in the wiki. That was early speculation, since disproved.

The original post also mentioned koreader. As far as I know that doesn't support KFX. I don't know whether or not it supports hyphenation some other way.
Yes, I can appreciate that Amazon would want to avoid inserting (many) characters into the content stream. So they compute offsets into that stream (representing positions where hyphens can be) and store those in a separate stream, and they can merge these very efficiently as the content stream is read into memory and page layout is applied.

The computation is done in the cloud (once for each title, and re computing whenever they update the hyphenation behavior), obviating the need for (at least several) hyphenation dictionaries on the device, eliminating CPU usage to do hyphenation lookups, and also lets them refine the hyphenation behavior without any device updates.
Last edited by tomsem; 04-25-2017 at 03:25 PM.
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Old 04-26-2017, 05:23 AM   #6
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Originally Posted by jhowell View Post
The original post also mentioned koreader. As far as I know that doesn't support KFX. I don't know whether or not it supports hyphenation some other way.
No koreader doesn't support KFX, it reads epubs. It relies on CRE and hyphenation is done on every epub using dictionaries (you have to manually set the language though, it can't detect it), they don't need to include soft hyphens.
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Old 04-26-2017, 05:44 AM   #7
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Originally Posted by tomsem View Post
The computation is done in the cloud (once for each title, and re computing whenever they update the hyphenation behavior), obviating the need for (at least several) hyphenation dictionaries on the device, eliminating CPU usage to do hyphenation lookups, and also lets them refine the hyphenation behavior without any device updates.
So this involves sending to Amazon any sideloaded document in kfx format to be (re)hyphenated, doesn't it?
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Old 04-26-2017, 05:52 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by guerrilla View Post
So this involves sending to Amazon any sideloaded document in kfx format to be (re)hyphenated, doesn't it?
It involves downloading (via the Kindle) from Amazon KFX format where applicable. If you want options for margins, fonts, line-height, font sizes, and maybe a larger then 6" screen, go with Kobo. If you want Amazon CS, go with Kindle. Kobo handles ePub.
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Old 04-26-2017, 08:14 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem View Post
Yes, I can appreciate that Amazon would want to avoid inserting (many) characters into the content stream. So they compute offsets into that stream (representing positions where hyphens can be) and store those in a separate stream, and they can merge these very efficiently as the content stream is read into memory and page layout is applied.

The computation is done in the cloud (once for each title, and re computing whenever they update the hyphenation behavior), obviating the need for (at least several) hyphenation dictionaries on the device, eliminating CPU usage to do hyphenation lookups, and also lets them refine the hyphenation behavior without any device updates.
While this is a plausible possible implementation, it does not match my understanding of how hyphenation is accomplished in KFX.

Do you have any evidence to support this?

----

I have converted several very short test books to KFX using Kindle Previewer 3 and the KFX Output plugin for calibre. I was able to account for every data structure present in the converted books and found nothing related to hyphenation. Despite that, these books are properly hyphenated when read.

In addition, I have found hyphenation dictionaries present in all of the KFX rendering software that I have examined. For example in the latest Kindle for PC, the file "res.dat" contains hyphenation dictionaries in multiple languages.
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Old 04-26-2017, 09:12 AM   #10
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It involves downloading (via the Kindle) from Amazon KFX format where applicable. If you want options for margins, fonts, line-height, font sizes, and maybe a larger then 6" screen, go with Kobo. If you want Amazon CS, go with Kindle. Kobo handles ePub.
Margins etc. are part of the problem (as I stated in the OP) but not relevant to what I was asking.
And it's not just about downloading KFX ebooks from Amazon. If hyphenation works the way tomsen says, when you convert an ebook with calibre's KFX Output plugin its content should be sent to an amazon server to be hyphenated.
Sounds so absurd to me (even for kindle standards) that I'd rather believe jhowell is right.


BTW I think I'll go with Tolino (rather tha Kobo). When I bought my PW, a couple years ago, kindle screens were unmatched. Nowadays there's no point sticking to it, as you can get elsewhere a good screen AND more flexibility.
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Old 04-26-2017, 09:29 AM   #11
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It is also automatic in that it is ON, always, untweakable.

To read an Amazon purchase unhyphenated, as is my preference, on my amazon tablets, I have to have it sent to an old kindle for pc, de drm it, format shift it, send to an app that actual lets me control what I see. Very poor, and A may break that process chain at any time
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