Hyphenation
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For those who can’t afford a webhost in wordpress.org there is a way to hyphenate your justified texts in your wordpress.com posts, without plugins or javascript. It’s not automatic and it doesn’t work for the whole blog, but is not totally manual either. You just have to copy your text in an hyphenator online like this one <http://www.softhyphen.com/>, and then paste the result in the html section of your post.
Anyway, I hope wordpress.com will include an automatic hyphenation option in the edition sections of their themes. It would be wonderful for an optional better looking of our blogs.
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Hyphenation takes a pretty large database and some serious processor cycles, and since the editor is not tied to the theme width and the CSS (except I think on one theme here), it gets even more complex.
Not saying it can’t be done, just saying it isn’t a little project as it would require all themes to be updated with “editor” CSS files specific to that theme, and it would get even nastier if someone modified that theme’s CSS and widened or narrowed the content area.
Interesting too that the two high-powered graphic designers I had the pleasure to work under and learn from would not let us hyphenate, much less use fully justified text. If we sent something for proofing, all hyphenation we might have missed would be stricken out.
And please, this isn’t saying it isn’t something that shouldn’t be added at some point, this is just my opinion.
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One other thing I’ll mention, is that hyphenation on the web is difficult. What if someone sets their browser view to show text larger? If the hyphenation is based on a certain font size and font family and the visitor’s browser is set to show a different font size (perhaps they have can’t see very well) that will move the hyphenated words away from the ends of lines. I’ve actually seen this quite a bit on the web even with my browser set at defaults for font size and zoom level. Or on a flexible with theme how would you account for browser window width?
The web just isn’t there yet as it would require the XHTML/HTML generated for a page to be dynamic and XHTML/HTML is not dynamic, and XHTML/HTML is the language of the web.
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You’re right. It is difficult. Let’s call it a challenge, then :) But if it can be done in text processors, no matter the width, size, font or language of the document, I’m sure it can be done on the web too (what would our great-grandparents think about colour tv or Skype?).
And in the meantime, there is already a good project in that direction, as you probably know: Hyphenator.js (http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/).
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