Suggestions: Hyphenation

[wilhelmer]

Hi there,
I really enjoy working with NWP, but as stated several times before, hyphenation in other languages than English is a mess. I know that Nisus relies on the Apple hyphenation engine, and I appreciate the newer possibility to enter soft hyphens, but still feels quite unconfortable to check the whole document for wrong hyphenations and manually correct them every time you change something in your paragraphs. Also, the grammar check fails on words with soft hyphens.

Suggestions:

a) It would be great to have a custom hyphenation dictionary, just like the custom dictionary for grammar. Right-click the word, select hyphenation from context menu, enter the syllables in a dialog box. MS Word has had this functionality ever since.
b) Implement an option to disable hyphenation for all unknown (= underlined by the grammar check) words. Most hyphenation errors occur on complex words that Nisus (or the Apple engine) doesn't know.
c) Fix the grammar check on words with soft hyphens.

Best regards,

Lars

[martin]

Thanks for the suggestions Lars. We can do something about the misspelled word markings (squiggles) incorrectly appearing on any words with soft hyphens, but I'm not sure about the rest. As you mentioned, we rely on Apple for hyphenation and I don't think they provide what we need to accomplish what you've outlined. But we'll look into it, thanks.

[ptram]

Martin, for some languages the OpenOffice dictionaries are reported to be way better than Apple's. Maybe you could investigate on using them, at least as an option.

Paolo

[martin]

Thanks Paolo, that sounds like an excellent source for default hyphenation dictionaries, if we are able to add this.

[Kino]

Martin, for some languages the OpenOffice dictionaries are reported to be way better than Apple's.

If you are speaking about spelling dictionaries (not hyphenation dictionaries), you can already use OpenOffice dictionaries in Snow Leopard, not extensions for OO 3.x but those for OO 2.x. You will find download links at
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries.

For example, if you want to try Italian dictionary (I don’t know whether it is better or not) . . .

1. Download http://prdownloads.sf.net/linguistico/i ... p?download;

2. Unzip italiano_2_4_2007_09_01.zip;

3. Put it_IT.aff and it_IT.dic in /Users/you/Library/Spelling/.

It will be shown as Italiano (Library) that you can use in all applications supporting Spelling Service, including NWP of course.