No soft hyphen???

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ninjagame
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by ninjagame »

greenmorpher wrote:I made a point of mentioning X.6.1. This OS has some type problems -- so it may not work with .1 but it might work with X.6.2.
Geoff,

having upgraded to 10.6.2 his morning, I can say that the "soft hyphen" macro I've found in the "Nisus Writer Pro Macro" forum yesterday (Fri Jan. 22nd) does indeed work with 10.6.2. (I've searched the forum again for this post but it seems to have disappeared. Maybe it's been taken off for maintenance ;-) .) It also did work with 10.6 when I first upgraded to Snow Leopard; so it's sound to assume that it'd work with 10.6.1, too.
Note that a true soft hyphen not only breaks the word where you want it to, but introduces the hyphen symbol itself. If you do something that reflows the text, that soft hyphen automatically disappears as does any hyphen introduced automatically.
Well, that's exactly what this "soft hyphen" macro does.

So, if it doesn't reappear soon, I can send you the code by mail if you're interested.

ninjagame
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greenmorpher
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by greenmorpher »

Thanks, ninjagame. I have to admit, though, that my interest was really just curiosity rather than a need. I don't use hyphenation in my word processor documents. I do the more complex layout stuff in Canvas.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

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ninjagame
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by ninjagame »

greenmorpher wrote:Thanks, ninjagame. I have to admit, though, that my interest was really just curiosity rather than a need.
Geoff,

no harm in that. Humanity wouldn't have got and wouldn't get anywhere without being curious ;-)!

ninjagame
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martin
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by martin »

We've placed a insert soft hyphen macro into our macro repository.

And yes, one does need to have the menu View > Allow Hyphenation checked for the soft hyphen to appear as visible.
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Elbrecht
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by Elbrecht »

Hi -

here is a customized "U.S. Extended SHY" keyboard - feel free to check for yourself:

http://www.elbrecht.com/shy.zip

Just "un-archive" and copy both files "U.S. Extended SHY.keylayout" and "U.S. Extended SHY.icns" to your:

User / Library / Keyboard Layouts

You have to activate the "U.S. Extended SHY" keyboard via:

System Preferences / Language & Text / Input Sources / U.S. Extended SHY

The SHY keyboard will show in "Input Menu" then. In "Keyboard Viewer" SHY is the "invisible one" left to "z". Easily done with any language specific keyboard - no need for a Macro - in my eyes. Hope you enjoy the show!

HE
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phspaelti
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by phspaelti »

Well the one advantage that a macro has over HE's keyboard solution is that it can make sure that hyphenation is "on". Unfortunately it seems that the macro posted in the depository does not do that. (It just has a single line "Type…"). Here is a macro that does:

Code: Select all

if Menu State "Allow Hyphenation"
else
	Allow Hyphenation
end
$softHyphen = Text.newWithCharacter 0x00AD
Type Text $softHyphen
best
Philip
philip
Groucho
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by Groucho »

I read somewhere of an open source script that automatically inserted soft-hyphen at hyphenation points. It used Tex (TeX? teX?) hyphenation patterns. I’m sorry I no longer have the site’s address. I kept a reference for a while and wanted to start a topic as I sometimes use Italian and Spanish and English hyphenation rules applied to these languages make a funny effect. But then my non-English files are a rare occurrence, and publishers are used to drop documents into InDesign templates and work with simple formatting, and so it all slowly faded off of my mind.
There are times, though, that I like to print a copy of a file for my convenience, and I can go through it and insert soft-hyphens or real hyphens by hand and I can do this with ease on a 20- or 30-page document, but not on a 300-page one. And what’s more there’s many times I change font, or size, before going to the printer, and that means parsing the document again.
I think it may be interesting to have a look at this whatchamacallit, at least until Nisus drops Apple’s layout engine (and this is a deep wish).

Greetings, Henry.
Kino
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by Kino »

Groucho wrote:I think it may be interesting to have a look at this whatchamacallit, at least until Nisus drops Apple’s layout engine (and this is a deep wish).
But who will create the non-Apple layout engine? You? ;-) I don’t wish Nisus Soft to abandon the current text engine. Instead, I wish them to support its all features. For example, Format:Character Case:Display as Small Caps should use the corresponding ATSUI/OpenType feature for fonts having it. One of the advantages of using Apple’s is that new features in Cocoa Text System will be automatically available.

Apart from that, I think it would be very difficult to create a text engine better than Apple’s. Well, there are applications using their own text engine. But Mellel does not seem to support, for example, Bengali and egword universal, discontinued Japanese word processor supporting the vertical writing, does not handle Arabic.

Personally I think asking Apple to support non-US English hyphenation rules in OS X Cocoa would be more practically useful and effective. With such a feature, we could expect a future version of NWP to use an appropriate set of rules for text in an applied language style.

If you happen to want to send such a feature request to Apple, you’d better use http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/ (ADC membership required but you can get it freely if you spend some seconds/minutes to fill a form). While a product feedback may reach no one, my experience tells that someone competent does read a bug report from an ADC member.
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martin
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by martin »

phspaelti wrote:Well the one advantage that a macro has over HE's keyboard solution is that it can make sure that hyphenation is "on".
That's a good point, thanks for the macro Philip.
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martin
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by martin »

Kino wrote:I don’t wish Nisus Soft to abandon the current text engine. Instead, I wish them to support its all features. For example, Format:Character Case:Display as Small Caps should use the corresponding ATSUI/OpenType feature for fonts having it.
This NWP feature should use "true" small caps when available in the font and supported by Apple.
Apart from that, I think it would be very difficult to create a text engine better than Apple’s.
There are always things to complaint about, but Apple's text engine is very nice overall.
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greenmorpher
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by greenmorpher »

Martin sez:
And yes, one does need to have the menu View > Allow Hyphenation checked for the soft hyphen to appear as visible.
Ah -- that's why I was getting the break and not the hyphen. The thing is, though, 90% of the time I want a soft hyphen is when I don't want general hyphenation happening -- I just want to break this one big word ...

That soft hyphen needs to be outside the general hyphen rule.

Martin sez:
Apple's text engine is very nice overall
It ought to be by now. It must be 10 years since I first saw OS X demo-ed here in Oz, and the text engine was supposed to be one of its hot features. It's clear that Nisus, along with a lot of others, has been battling the slow development of the text engine. I read somewhere that Apple doesn't use the text engine in its own Pages. True or ... ? :o

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

FREE Bonus book offer. Get "How to make great ads for (sm)all business" FREE when you buy "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" or "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter". Amazon or http://www.worsleypress.com
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Elbrecht
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by Elbrecht »

Hi Geoff -
I read somewhere that Apple doesn't use the text engine in its own Pages. True or ... ?
Pages is Webkit driven - a Webkid from the very beginning - now going iPad.

HE
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spitfire31
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by spitfire31 »

greenmorpher wrote:The thing is, though, 90% of the time I want a soft hyphen is when I don't want general hyphenation happening -- I just want to break this one big word ...

That soft hyphen needs to be outside the general hyphen rule.
EXACTLY! And please excuse the caps… :oops:

I don't use automatic hyphenation since I mainly write scripts or drafts, so I don't mind the untidy right margin. But, just like Geoff, I often want to break a long word creating an odd white strip in the text flow. It works just fine in Word, but I can't go back to Word for that single option.

So, for my particular needs (and it does feel good not to be the only one with this particular need), the SHY macro doesn't really help. I don't want the rest of the text automatically hypened, and definitely not under rules that don't belong with my main language.

Best,

Joachim
Groucho
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by Groucho »

Kino said:

But who will create the non-Apple layout engine? You?

Personally I think asking Apple to support non-US English hyphenation rules in OS X Cocoa would be more practically useful and effective.
OK, I won’t write a text engine.
I just wanted to point out:

First: I wished NWP had multilingual hyphenation.
Second: A bit faster, especially when in page view.

Nisus put whatever engine it likes under the hood, I just care of the effect.

And, as for asking Apple, I’ve been doing so ever since Tiger. I didn’t know of the ADC membership, though. I’ll gladly spend a few seconds/minutes on it. Thank you.

Henry.
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greenmorpher
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Re: No soft hyphen???

Post by greenmorpher »

Apple should have full multilingual text capability but when they ignore their own text engine -- which had been a major selling point of OS X since back in the beginning -- and use another way of powering their own WP/Page layout program, you have to ask yourself whether their text engine actually has a future.

Also they keep changing OS X. Lots ofr things had to be rewritten or tweaked to work properly with OS X. At one end of the spectrum, you have Chocoflop, a nice little Cocoa graphics program, which the developer had made up to Beta 0.9 in Leopard, but who just gave up with all the changes to Snow Leopard. Dumped the thing, saying he would have to virtually rewrite it to run on X.6.x.

On the other hand, you have Canvas X -- no development for 6-7 years (maybe more) apparently full of bugs, which suddenly starts running virtually bug free~! Clearly, all those bugs we thought were poor work by the Canvas team were actually OS X not operating according to the published specs ... which the Canvas team had followed.

I worry for Nisus who have worked like dogs to get NW up on an OS which clearly was like sludge early on and was like jelly, it seems, until X.6.x. What is Apple going to do now? Is it going to develop two competing text engines or will it dump one -- the one Nisus uses -- and focus instead on the Pages approach? Will that be where we will see multilingual text capability? Is Pages a first shot across the bows of Adobe and Quark? Will Apple try to take over the DTP world as it has the video editing world, and will it bring out a junior version that will kill off smaller WPs in the process?

What does Apple regard as its core?

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

FREE Bonus book offer. Get "How to make great ads for (sm)all business" FREE when you buy "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" or "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter". Amazon or www.worsleypress.com
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