Forum How do I...?

Hyphenation in left-aligned paragraphs?

virthos
Is it correct that the hyphenation properties are only interpreted if the value of the text-align property is set to "justified"? I tried hyphenation in left-aligned paragraphs but it didn't work.

If it's not there: Are there plans to add this feature? Hyphenation of left-aligned paragraphs is a need especially for German text where there are so many long words that some lines have too much whitespace at the right edge.
mikeday
That makes sense; we will investigate this for a future release of Prince.
virthos
Good news, thanks! :)
mikeday
We have now released Prince 6.0 rev 3, which supports hyphenation regardless of the text alignment setting. Thanks for raising the issue! :)
virthos
I just downloaded rev 3 and found that left-aligned text now looks much better than before. Thank you very much for this "quick-and-pretty" improvement! :wink:

By the way, typesetting software like QuarkXPress and InDesign allow users to specify a so-called "hyphenation area", that is the tolerable gap (in pt or mm) between the end of a line and the right edge of a text block. If the last word of a line ends within the hyphenation area the following word stays on the next line even if its first part, after hyphenation, would fit on the previous line. With this technique a higher typographic quality is achieved. (You could think of this as specifying a minimum length for the first part of a hyphenated word.)

Is there a way to fine-tune the Prince output in such a manner?
mikeday
At the moment we have a hyphenate-before property, that specifies the minimum number of characters in the first part of a hyphenated word; would this help?
virthos
Some typographers would say that a fixed number of characters cannot be the solution because in most fonts the width of the characters differ. But I tested it and, yes, for my purposes that does help. Thanks a lot for your great support :D