On 9/22/09, Peter Moulder <Peter.Moulder@...38...> wrote:
We have enough trouble with other SVG renderers doing basic things like coloured text, let alone language-sensitive soft-hyphen handling.
Frankly, I would be happy if they would just always render a hyphen on breaks. This would work for a majority of languages. Current behavior is only useful for a minority.
The level of implementation of various standards is no excuse, IMHO, to not implement a particular feature if it is doable in principle and often requested by the users.
Librsvg and a Webkit-based browser I have do the same as current inkscape, while firefox 3.0 and batik svn render all soft hyphen characters the same as hyphen characters, even when they occur in the middle of a line.
That's a sad picture, I agree.
Accordingly, I don't think we should encourage use of soft hyphens in SVG,
On the contrary, we should use our clout to encourage a better support for it. If the standard is deficient, we should select an interpretation that makes most sense and make it a de facto standard.
and I think we should implement basic features like underlines before trying to implement behaviour that hasn't even been codified in any standard yet.
I absolutely don't see why one should preclude the other. Both are things requested by users. It's just that for hyphenation, there's a seemingly easy way to achieve it without changing Inkscape itself, hence this extension. Too bad if it has to be turned down because of a poor standard and a lazy software community that doesn't push the standard to become more useful.
By delegating hyphenation to software designed for text rendering, we have more chance of getting good hyphenation not just in SVG documents (which pretty much never use body text, let alone hyphenation)
On the contrary, Inkscape is already used a lot for single-page leaflets, scientific posters, and other documents with a lot of flowed text. If we add hyphenation, it will be used even more.
hyphenation is more valuable. As has already been noted, hyphenation is difficult: both in choosing where hyphens may be placed (which itself is an unsolved problem for some languages), and in choosing how to render those hyphenations (choice of hyphen glyph if any, respelling), and in choosing line breaks to avoid hyphenating when possible.
That a problem is difficult to solve in the general case is no excuse to not try to solve it in a special case that will be useful in 95% of situations.