All about SHYness - Soft Hyphenation - [SHY] U+00AD

[Elbrecht]

Hi -

from time to time there spring up feature requests concerning Soft Hyphen(ation) and there were a couple of threads before. But all of a sudden Soft Hyphen seems to work on my Leopard the way layouters keep asking for. Please have a look for yourself - it even works with my still hacked TTF versions of old Type 1 fonts - so why should it not work with any font you might be interested in? As Martin wrote, Nisus didn't change anything for this to work - that's why it must be a nice & undocumented(?) new Leopard feature. Would be great to get this thread finally closed this way.

EDIT: No one to confirm, that Soft Hyphen(ation) is no feature to request anymore?

With thanks for help on the way
HE

[ninjagame]

EDIT: No one to confirm, that Soft Hyphen(ation) is no feature to request anymore?

Elbrecht –

A few days ago I had the opportunity to try your solution for the SHY on a machine running OS 10.5.4 – and it worked. First, I want to thank you for that. It's going to help me a lot with my work.
On the other hand, soft hyphenation still remains a feature request for me. Of course, if I could – i.e. if I knew how to do it – , I could write a macro that would do nothing but "type U+00AD" and "Convert > From Unicode Code Points". I could attach a shortcut to it and that would amount to just the feature I'm dreaming of.
But: If it's just that – why do we users, we customers have to do it? It is as if you buy a car, and where the radio is supposed to be there's just an empty slot in the dashboard and the salesman tells you, "Oh, if you want a radio in your car, I'm afraid you'll have to install it yourself". Sure: The car is fully functional as a car without a radio. But then, the radio is a standard gadget in about every car manufactured in the last 30, 40 years and it's there even if you don't need it and never use it.
I don't want to over-emphasize the issue. Thanks to you, I've found a solution that works and that'll have to do for the time being. But some time in the future...
OK, I stop right there

ninjagame

[martin]

Of course, if I could – i.e. if I knew how to do it – , I could write a macro that would do nothing but "type U+00AD" and "Convert > From Unicode Code Points". I could attach a shortcut to it and that would amount to just the feature I'm dreaming of.

Here is such a macro:

Code: Select all

$character = Text.newWithCodepoint(0x00AD)
Type Text $character

Hopefully it's obvious how to customize the macro for other Unicode characters, should anyone find that useful.

[ninjagame]

THANKS MARTIN – I'll try it next time I can get to the OS 10.5.4 machine!

ninjagame

[Elbrecht]

Even more elegant -

I customized my German Keyboard with SIL "Ukelele" - it's easily done: just copy SHY from the Character Palette to the Key you want to use to enter. And you're done with it - then it's as easy as entering German "ß" or "Umlaute" - if you know what I mean...

Enjoy
HE

EDIT: As there is a standard NBSP/NonBreakingSPace there should be SHY/SoftHYphen as well available from any Apple Keyboard right away - but isn't. And as all Apple Keyboards are Language dependent, I'd prefer to customize each one as s/he likes. It's good to get used to customize one's machine anyway - you learn a lot about flying...

[Neonsquare]

Hm... I've just tried it using NWP v1.1 on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4. The behaviour is, that if I insert a soft-hyphen it will break-up the word if it doesn't fit on the line, but there is no hyphen shown in this case. Is this intentional?

ciao,
Jochen

[Elbrecht]

Jochen -

definitely not! - what font are you using? All fonts I use work fine! What hardware are you running? What else is diferent with you?

HE

[Neonsquare]

Entwarnung

I've tried it using the macro above and this doesn't seem to work for me. If I insert it from the characters dialog it works like a charm!

Thank you,
Jochen

[martin]

That's odd- the macro doesn't do anything fancy. Are you perhaps inserting a different hyphen variant from the character window?

[Kino]

The behaviour is, that if I insert a soft-hyphen it will break-up the word if it doesn't fit on the line, but there is no hyphen shown in this case.

Soft hyphens are not displayed unless you have enabled "View:Allow Hyphenation", at least on my PPC Mac.

And when it is enabled, virtual hyphens will be inserted arbitrarily, which is annoying. The only way I know to prevent it is to insert U+200D (zero-width joiner).

It is Apple but perhaps Nisus soft can do something to make soft hyphens visible without allowing the automatic hyphenation?

The simplest way to insert soft hyphen and zero-width joiner (or other characters you need) would be to use a custom keybinding dictionary. With the following file installed, you can enter soft-hyphen by control-hyphen and zero-width joiner by control-equal.
http://www2.odn.ne.jp/alt-quinon/files/ ... KBdict.zip
See readme.txt inside the zip archive for details.

I'm almost sure that it is abnormal to use zero-width joiner to prevent the automatic hyphenation. AFAIK the primarily purpose of the character is to get a contextual form of Arabic letters.

[Elbrecht]

Well -

I don't know, I actually don't need SHY at all. But all seems fine now with Leopard - that's why I asked others to check for themselves. We seem to have now the layouter's handling of SoftHyphen - over against the ISO/Unicode way to handle U+00AD quite differently. SoftHyphen seems now to even override the hyphenation rules for the word concerned.
Kino seems to ask for SHY without allowing hyphenation at all - but that's quite another beast - I wonder how this should work backstage though...

HE

PS: BTW UnicodeChecker is a very powerful Service to make up your mind - in case...

[Kino]

Kino seems to ask for SHY without allowing hyphenation at all

Because Allow Hyphenation does something very wrong to other languages than English at times.

screenshot

AllowHyphen.jpg (38.87 KiB) Viewed 23389 times

[Groucho]

I think there is no such thing as a hyphenation for languages other than English. Rummaging within "System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/Resources" I found only two hyphenation-related files, "English-Hyphenation.txt" and "English-HyphenationExc.txt". Though I have spellcheckers in several languages (Spanish, French, Italian and German), hyphenation rules are English only. I tried to enable hyphenation on a document both in TextEdit and NWP (either use Apple's centralized language scheme). Well, shifting between languages doesn't change the place where hyphenation occurs. So, if you want hyphenation to be correct in non-English languages you should find a way to hack a hyphenation definition file. Soft hyphens, in my humble opinion, should only be used for uncommon terms, not as a substitute of a hyphenation engine.

Cheers, Henry.

[Elbrecht]

Well -

better leave hyphenation to the layout app then - I never justify within Nisus Writer. Would be nice to be able to PDF publish justified text from within NW - though...

HE

[Groucho]

Hi, Elbrecht.
A lot of folks, like me, print straight from NW. I use a layout application sparingly (double trouble). And then there is the pdf conversion, as you say. I am putting the blame on Apple, not Nisus, for bundling a hyphenation dictionary in English only, and not advertising enough (I was pushed by suspicion, for one). Luckily, 95 of my documents out of a hundred are in English, but…
But as for Nisus… well… I was wondering, why don't they offer a third-party dictionary to be purchased separately? I think I remember this was the way with NW Classic.

Cheers, Henry.