[sword-devel] Soft hyphens

[David Haslam]

Having soft hyphens to improve readability on hand held small devices is fine
in theory, but it's not in practice. 

The more I've thought about soft hyphens, the more I've understood that
their use was a kludge for a particular typesetting task at one time for
publishing a printed Bible from Quark Xpress.

They have no significance outside that context.

That you can have the same word occur with and without a soft hyphen
illustrates the point. They have no semantic significance.

Were the same Bible needed to be typeset with a different page size or
layout, then the whole task would need to be done again differently in the
desktop publishing suite.

I therefore have come to the view that all soft hyphens should be removed
from the USFM files.

If in future the USFM files are repurposed by others to make a printed Bible
or PDF edition, then it becomes the responsibility of the licensed publisher
to ensure that the layout doesn't break Lingala words in an unnatural way at
the end of a line.

Likewise, to be of use in a module, the soft hyphens would need to be
applied consistently to every word capable of being wordwrapped, not
haphazardly to only those words that merely happened to be at the end of a
line of text in the page layout for the original printed edition.

[That's responding to Michael's point.]

NB. The matter is also being pursued in context in Fr Cyrille's LinVB repo
on GitLab.

Does anyone know of any other SWORD module that contains soft hyphens?

Or is this the first time and context where this topic has come up?

Obtaining soft hyphen consistency is achievable in two ways.
1. Low effort - just remove 'em all.
2. Labour intensive - generate a full words list, analyse for soft hyphens,
and then apply soft hyphens to those matching words still lacking them.

Best regards,

David





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