Re: GSoC project "Hyphenation"?

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA> writes:
> I guess there's a combination of reasons for that:
> - Emacs doesn't support proportional fonts very well.
> - monospaced justified text is rarely used.
> - => justified text is rarely used in Emacs.
> - hyphenation is rarely needed for non-justified text.
>
> E.g. without hyphenation, your email would not have been much
> less pleasantly balanced.  There are only 3 paragraphs where your
> hyphenation lets Emacs's filling algorithm give noticeably better
> results, but by tweaking down the fill-column on a case-by-case
> basis (from 60 to 57, for example), you can easily get back
> something reasonably close (aesthetically) to the
> hyphenated version.

One thing that I find I do sort of want in practice, is simply more
intelligent treatment of _explicit_ hyphens, as filling often yields
awkward results when long hyphenated words
("moggle-crested-snurd-radler") occur in a paragraph.  It'd be nice if
both filling and display-time word-wrapping would be willing to break
after hyphens, and not insert whitespace after a hyphen when filling.

That would presumably be a lot simpler than full balls-to-the-wall
hyphenation.  Hmm, maybe not enough for a full GSoC project tho...

-Miles

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