I also cc: our text expert, Richard Hughes. Richard, what would it take to implement adding visible hyphens on breaks in flowed text?
It's one of those things that is supposed to work, but since we've never had a normal UI that inserts them (Ctrl-U doesn't count) they've never been subjected to any real testing. I'll take a look.
I wasn't aware that some languages don't use visible hyphens. I could hope that Pango reports that the soft hyphen is a zero-width invisible character for those languages, but unfortunately hoping for something does not necessarily make it true.
Hmm. Pango returns us a glyph index of 0xfffffff for the soft hyphen character, so we can never display it. This is a bit of a problem because the soft hyphen character does have a glyph and it is that glyph that we are supposed to draw, but Pango won't tell us what it is. We could attempt to poke around in the font and look for the normal hyphen glyph, but (a) that might look different and (b) it would subvert any script-specific handling that Pango did for the aforementioned languages without visible hyphens.
The post [1] is a proposal to change the behaviour to the current one, but I can't see a commit that implements the proposal so it may not have happened like that. The post [2] is much more recent and is basically asking the same question I am; no reply.
In any case, it seems very unlikely that any kind of fix is going to be suitable for 0.47.
Richard.
[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-i18n-list/2003-May/msg00016.html [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-i18n-list/2009-April/msg00008.html