There is no mention of it in the post. If words (in any language) can be arbitrarily long and columns can be arbitrarily narrow, we will need to solve for this anyway.
Even without those extremes, I feel that there will always be place for the good old hypen when displaying or printing text for the main purpose of readability. No need to max out on perfect "look" in every application of text.
In fact in many places one might even find columns with jagged right edges more readable -- letting you visually distinguish each line from the one above/below it easily by length alone -- and may even lend a certain aesthetic character that is the opposite of mechanical / boring / machine produced / sterile.
Of course not negating the need for a well implemented method without bugs to justify text correctly when the use case demands it.
What is an example of a "high-end page-layout program" referenced in that document? I mean, of course I assume they exist for professional type setting, book publishing and such, but I have never seen or heard of the actual software.
We used Adobe InDesign at my last work, which I believe is an industry standard. Affinity Layout if you don’t want to sell your kidney to Adobe. Scribus is an open source project but I’m not sure how the quality is in that.
> Scribus is an open source project but I’m not sure how the quality is in that.
I am not a typographer, and I’ve never used it in a professional capacity, but v1.6 (early 2024) improved Scribus a lot. I’ve used it and liked it for some personal projects for years, but the improved typography in 1.6 is big.
There is only Adobe InDesign. Even though you can make high quality layouts in other programs (Affinity, Scribus) once you get to actually printing in pro printer the whole pipeline is InDesign. It's Adobes secret money printer, software that many don't realize it rivals Photoshop in usage.
No, the pro pipeline is PDF. You might argue that, if you are risk averse, you only trust Adobe’s tools to produce optimal PDF. This is of course Adobe’s moat. But Scribus’ export to pdf is excellent, in a pro setting
Thats not what I am talking about. Your PDF might be identical but printers often require either their specific InDesign settings or straight up packaged InDesign project as source for printing (they used to require postscript lol).
I am not gonna argue if they are correct or not but the reality i've experienced is that at minimum socially the printing industry is married to InDesign.
Thanks for that link! There is a bit more ... justification (pun intended) on that page for this recommendation to turn-on hypenation; and also some valuable advice on choosing spacing between words over spacing between letters.
The problem is knowing when to do it. The lang attribute and Content-Language header may not always be reliable. Authors mostly aren't using the WBR element.
Hyphenization is language and content-dependent. You need different rules for English and French text, for example. Moreover, it doesn't fit the "short paragraph style" most non-academic text is written in these days.
Hyphenation will probably lead to people thinking the content is generated by AI, which would be a significant downside for most websites. Users want to believe the site creator put effort in (regardless of whether they did or even if it's appropriate to have done.)
TFA also isn't talking about code comments, but considering the comment chain I'd like to point out that the only times I've seen hyphenated words there is when I'm pretty sure they were LLM generated... So... Unless the position for the hyphenation changes depending on the resolution (or page layout like with latex), I'd personally still guess an LLM was involved, honestly.
There is no mention of it in the post. If words (in any language) can be arbitrarily long and columns can be arbitrarily narrow, we will need to solve for this anyway.
Even without those extremes, I feel that there will always be place for the good old hypen when displaying or printing text for the main purpose of readability. No need to max out on perfect "look" in every application of text.
In fact in many places one might even find columns with jagged right edges more readable -- letting you visually distinguish each line from the one above/below it easily by length alone -- and may even lend a certain aesthetic character that is the opposite of mechanical / boring / machine produced / sterile.
Of course not negating the need for a well implemented method without bugs to justify text correctly when the use case demands it.