[xep-support] Hyphenation at /

[Nikolai Grigoriev]

Jim,

first of all, I'd like to thank you and all people who took part 
in the line-breaking discussion: it gives us important insights 
for future development.

At Tuesday, April 06, 2004 8:13 PM, Jim Melton wrote:
> I don't think that it would be a violation of your principles to allow 
> users to specify a list of "additional characters" at which words/strings 
> could be broken. 

We don't have any principles to disallow something :-). It is simply 
a matter of design: we are still in search of a proper interface to
line breaking control.

>  It is *extremely* inconvenient for document authors to 
> have to manually insert zero-width spaces (no such think on *my* keyboard, 
> so I'd have to use a character entity reference) or soft hyphens (same 
> problem), especially when there might be literally scores or hundreds of 
> places in a large, dynamic document.

You are not supposed to do it manually: stylesheets or other preprocessors
should be able to cope with the task. Our initial assumption was that 
a user can implement a line breaking algorighm of whatever complexity
by writing a separate preprocessor that would insert zero-width spaces 
and soft hyphens to control the formatter. Now it seems that the interface
is too low-level, and requires too much effort to leverage. 

> I'd like to add my voice to Jim Quest's in asking that 
> RenderX reconsider the decisions regarding hyphenating/breaking 
> character sequences based on either predefined non-letter 
> characters or non-letter characters specified by the person 
> installing/configuring XEP, and the decision to arbitrarily 
> break character sequences when no such "break character" 
> can be found and no hyphenation rule can be applied.

What we see from this thread is the need to add a configurable
input preprocessor to XEP, so that line breaking could be expressed
in terms of character classes and/or hyphenation patterns, rather than
special characters. The work is about to start; I don't promise 
immediate results, but we are definitely going  to take the issue 
very seriously.

Best regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX
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