calibre 4.6 hyphens in editor, viewer, and PDFs

[rjwse@aol.com]

I have questions about hyphens in editor, viewer, and PDFs. Apparently you can add hyphens with Polish Books which creates a second epub and renames old original. The new epub auto-hyphens by width of column in the editor and file viewer of the editor. Hyphenatable words are underlined. The new viewer also now hyphenates on the fiy. Hyphenatable words do not have &SHY showing in them. When converting to PDF there is a setting to hyphenate the output but this is a separate process entirely and the epub does not first have to go through the Polish Books. Have I got this right? Best regards, Pop

[kovidgoyal]

The viewer does not hyphenate on the fly, you have to add hyphens if you want hyphenation in the viewer. Hyphenated words have a soft hyphen (hte unicode character, not &shy inserted in them. And yes the PDF output does not require books to be pre-hyphenated.

[rjwse@aol.com]

Thank you for that explanation, Mr. Goyal. I wondered about the underlined words. I right-arrowed through one such word letter by letter and, indeed, there it was — a soft hyphen. A great many printed books are hypenated, it seems, so, for PDF print-outs, this would be a nice touch. Is there any overhead or drawbacks to using this feature for ebooks? Is there a time lag for loading? 4.6 is incredibly good! Best regards, Pop

[kovidgoyal]

The drawback is mostly that searching tends to not work and as you discovered words are incorrectly marked as mis-spelled in the editor. There are no serious performance implications, however. I do plan to fix both spelling and searching with hyphenated words in the future.

[rjwse@aol.com]

One additional small thing I just noticed: if you have hyphenated a file and you edit that file by adding a long word with many syllables, that one word will not (of its own accord) now automatically hyphenate.
Another topic: If you delete the 'old file' then 'unhyphenate' the new file, is that a safe thing to do? Or, would it be better to keep the 'old file' then unhyphenate? I am intrigued by this concept, but am worried about destruction of text. Best regards, Pop

[kovidgoyal]

You can safely add and remove hyphens, will not affect the text. But is generally a good practice to keep backups. And no hyphenation is not applied automatically ever, you should make it the last step in your book editing.

[GoSharks]

Is this form of hyphenation different from what the Hyphenate This! plugin does or is the plugin now unnecessary?
Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

Its the same thing, it inserts soft hyphens in text.

[GoSharks]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Its the same thing, it inserts soft hyphens in text.

Thanks Kovid!

The Hyphenate This! plugin requires the addition of a hyphenation dictionary for the language being hyphenated. Is the addition of a hyphenation dictionary unnecessary with this Calibre feature or do I need to dig deeper? (the language I am interested in is english)

Thanks for your help and Happy New Year!

[kovidgoyal]

yeah calibre comes with all the hyphenation dictionaries from libreoffice pre-installed. And Happy New Year to you too!

[GoSharks]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

yeah calibre comes with all the hyphenation dictionaries from libreoffice pre-installed. And Happy New Year to you too!

Excellent!!!
Do you anticipate in the future adding this as an option in the conversion process or will it remain a separate step in Polish Books?

Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

No plans to add it in conversion.

[MarkFalk]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Its the same thing, it inserts soft hyphens in text.

My apologizes, but there is a difference.
With nearly every (German) text the hyphenation with the plug-in works.
But yesterday I have converted a text in German from pdf to epub (and after editing converting again to azw3, but his makes no difference) and tried several time adding hyphens with the "Hyphenate This!"-plugin. It only added soft-hyphens to text inserted in/between <i class="calibre9"></i>, not into "normal" text; tested with the ereader and with ebook-edit the text is displayed w/o hyphenations. When searching for "\xad" as regex the hyphens are found in text in/between <i class="calibre9"></i> and this text can be displayed with hyphenation. After hyphening with ebook-polish the soft-hyphens are in the complete text and not only found with "\xad" but also are working when displaying the text. Seems as if ebook-polish does some things different than the plug-in.

[kovidgoyal]

Well yes, the implementation is different, so there well could be bugs in one not present in the other. But the end goal is the same

[MarkFalk]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Well yes, the implementation is different, so there well could be bugs in one not present in the other. But the end goal is the same

Maybe the "end-goal" is the same, but the real result is not the same. As explained: the "hyphen-it"-plug-in inserts soft-hyphens in the (German) text (.epub and .azw3, it it no difference) only when the text is in/between <i class="calibre9"> and </i> but not into the "normal" text. But ebook-polish inserts soft-hyphens in the complete text.
I can remember very vague that I have realized this also in the past with some few ebooks, but due to lack of time (and because I did not know the alternative hyphenation with ebook-polish) I did not further investigate this problem - and I really don´t remember this few ebooks.
So in my experience "hyphen-it" is buggy and ebook-polish is better. If I would have a wish: I would like to have the ebook-polish-hyphenation als plug-in.
If you want to test/check this I can send you the text.