On Monday, September 21, 2009, 6:19:38 PM, bulia wrote:
bb> On 9/21/09, Santhosh Thottingal <santhosh.thottingal@...400...> wrote:
For Malayalam, visible hyphens are not required. Not sure about other languages. Th inserted hyphen is "Soft Hyphen- \u00AD"
bb> And in German, even word spelling may change at the hyphenated bb> boundary. So it looks unlikely that a soft hyphen-based solution will bb> solve all our hyphenation needs. What we really need is a dictionary
Yes, for the general case.
For some specific cases, text that has had soft hyphens inserted will break better than text which has not had them inserted.
For cases where soft hyphen doesn't help well, don't use it.
None of which precludes later adding dictionary based breaking (which is required for Thai, for example) as well.
bb> of "word, pre-break, post-break" triads for each language. But still, bb> soft hyphen is a legal Unicode character and we must support it bb> anyway. I'm just wondering if it is supposed to be treated differently bb> depending on language; from what I read, it looks like it is always bb> replaced with a visible hyphen when a break occurs. So it may be a bb> workable solution for English and other languages but not for bb> Malayalam :( Please correct me if I'm wrong.
No, you are right. A soft hyphen is inserted into text to help a layout system figure out where to break a word with a hyphen at the end of the line.
If Malayalam (and indeed other languages) don't use hyphens at the end of lines to indicate broken words, then clearly the users of that language will not normally be inserting the soft hyphens. But if by chance they do, well, the hyphen will be displayed if it falls at the end of a line.