Group: Hyphenation Generally

The hy­phen­ation al­go­rithm used by wp-​Typography is based on the 1983 Stan­ford Ph.D. the­sis of pro­fes­sor Frank Liang: Word Hy-​phen-​a-​tion by Com-​puter. In this the­sis, Dr. Liang al­so de­vel­oped an Eng­lish (Unit­ed States) pat­tern file for use with his al­go­rithm. Liang’s Eng­lish pat­tern file was up­dat­ed in 1991 by Pe­ter Bre­it­en­lohn­er.

The re­sult­ing al­go­rithm — with the Eng­lish (Unit­ed States) pat­terns — finds 90% of all al­lowed hy­phen­ation points iden­ti­fied in the Webster’s Unabridged Dic­tio­nary with a 0% er­ror rate. Pat­terns for many ad­di­tion­al lan­guages have been de­vel­oped by oth­ers and vary in qual­i­ty.

Yes. The ad­min­is­tra­tive pan­el for wp-​Typography in­cludes an ed­itable ex­cep­tions list.

It de­pends on the search en­gine. Google and Ya­hoo prop­er­ly han­dle the soft-​hyphen char­ac­ter. Mi­crosoft and Ask im­prop­er­ly treat soft-​hyphens as word breaks. For­tu­nate­ly, Google and Ya­hoo com­prise more than 90% of the search mar­ket.

Be­cause Word­Press search queries the data­base — and hy­phen­ation is not stored to the database-​local search is not af­fect­ed.

Start­ing with In­ter­net Ex­plor­er 6, Fire­fox 3, Sa­fari 2, and Opera 8, all ma­jor web browsers have of­fered full sup­port for on­line hy­phen­ation.

The soft-​hyphen is an in­vis­i­ble char­ac­ter that com­mu­ni­cates to web browsers al­low­able line breaks with­in words. When a web brows­er wraps a line at a soft-​hyphen, a hy­phen is shown at line’s end.

Sim­i­lar to the soft-​hyphen, the zero-​space char­ac­ter com­mu­ni­cates al­low­able line breaks with­in strings of text. But un­like the soft-​hyphen, it does not show a hy­phen at line’s end. This is ide­al for forc­ing con­sis­tent wrap­ping of long URLs. It al­so can be used to force line breaks in un­co­op­er­a­tive web browsers af­ter hard-​hyphens in words like “zero-​space” and “soft-​hyphen”.

Hy­phen­ation in­creas­es the vi­su­al ap­peal of your web­site. When jus­ti­fy­ing text with­out hy­phen­ation, word spac­ing is dis­tract­ing­ly large. With left-​aligned text, the right edge will be un­nec­es­sar­i­ly ragged.

wp-​Typography has multi-​language sup­port. Pat­tern li­braries are in­clud­ed for:

• Afrikaans,
• Ar­men­ian,
• Basque,
• Bul­gar­i­an,
• Cata­lan,
• Chi­nese Pinyin (Latin),
• Croa­t­ian,
• Czech,
• Dan­ish,
• Dutch,
• Eng­lish (Unit­ed King­dom),
• Eng­lish (Unit­ed States),
• Es­ton­ian,
• Finnish,
• French,
• Gali­cian,
• Geor­gian,
• Ger­man,
• Ger­man (Tra­di­tion­al),
• Greek (An­cient),
• Greek (Mod­ern Mo­not­o­n­ic),
• Greek (Mod­ern Poly­ton­ic),
• Hin­di,
• Hun­gar­i­an,
• Ice­landic,
• In­done­sian,
• In­ter­lin­gua,
• Irish,
• Ital­ian,
• Latin,
• Latin (Clas­si­cal),
• Latin (Litur­gi­cal),
• Lat­vian,
• Lithuan­ian,
• Marathi,
• Mon­go­lian (Cyril­lic),
• Nor­we­gian,
• Oc­c­i­tan,
• Oriya,
• Pan­jabi,
• Pol­ish,
• Por­tuguese,
• Ro­man­ian,
• Russ­ian,
• San­skrit,
• Ser­bian (Cyril­lic),
• Ser­bocroa­t­ian (Cyril­lic),
• Ser­bocroa­t­ian (Latin),
• Slo­vak,
• Sloven­ian,
• Span­ish,
• Swedish,
• Tamil,
• Tel­ugu,
• Thai,
• Turk­ish,
• Turk­men,
• Ukrain­ian, and
• Welsh.

Re­cent brows­er ver­sions sup­port the hyphens CSS prop­er­ty to en­able hy­phen­ation. If you want to the fin­er con­trol over hy­phen­ation that wp-​Typography of­fers, make sure that the your theme stylesheet does not con­tain

hyphens: auto;

(or one of its vendor-​prefixed vari­ants like -webkit-hyphens). If you can’t re­move the prop­er­ty from the theme’s stylesheet, make sure to add

hyphens: manual;

in a child theme stylesheet or wp-Typography’s in­ject­ed CSS. (Don’t for­get the vendor-​prefixed vari­a­tions!)

This plu­g­in in­cludes hy­phen­ation pat­terns for over 50 lan­guages. Please make sure your website’s pri­ma­ry lan­guage is se­lect­ed. wp-​Typography pref­er­ences can be set in the Word­Press ad­min sec­tion un­der Settings > wp-Typography.