nisus.com

I am using NW Pro on a German Lion. If I insert a «soft hyphen» in a word, the word gets hyphenated at the insertion point (if possible), but no hyphen appears (not on the screen and not in print). Is it a known bug? Any workaround? I don‘t want to use normal hyphens which will not disappear if the line case changes.

Thanks for help
Ulrich

Hi -

what font gets displayed? - are you sure it got a soft-hyphen glyph? How about other fonts?

HE

Just made some tests with Lucida Grande, Helvetica and Arial - same problem.

OK -

you're sure to have Hyphenation enabled then?

HE

Ooooops ... No!

I didn‘t know that hyphenation has to be enabled for soft hyphens.

With hyphenation enabled it works. But German hyphenation is a well known catastrophe, I don't want it.

Does that mean that I can't use hyphenation at all?

I feel like a stoneage typesetter

But anyway, thanks for making me things clear.

Sorrily -

without Hyphenation no hyphenation - not even soft hyphenation…

Looks like it's not worth to publish in German anymore -
good luck to you from the once center of good old typography -
Frankfurt, Germany.

HE

useeger wrote:I didn‘t know that hyphenation has to be enabled for soft hyphens.

Yes, it is true, automatic hyphenation must be enabled for soft hyphens to be shown.

As you may know, NWP is built on Apple's text engine, which we rely upon for hyphenation. Aside from Apple's poor non-English hyphenation, their soft/manual hyphenation seems poorly implemented. If you don't have automatic hyphenation enabled, Apple's engine still breaks/wraps a line where the soft hyphen was inserted, but simply doesn't show the hyphen character! I can't see why anyone would ever want that.

In any case, it's been suggested that we augment/override Apple's hyphenation, and it's something we're looking into. Hopefully at some point we can let the user create their own custom hyphenation dictionaries, or at least use OpenOffice's dictionaries.

Dear Martin

Such a solution would be a very important thing for users that write in german.
I hope it will happen soon!

Thanks in advance
Peter