[tex-hyphen] weighting hyphenation points

Stephan Hennig mailing_list at arcor.de
Wed May 26 16:31:38 CEST 2010


Am 26.05.2010 10:08, schrieb Jörg Knappen:
> Taco wrote:
>> Stephan Hennig wrote:
>>>
>>>>      A) word compounds  - penalty -20 (e.g.)
>>>
>>> Don't negative penalties encourage line breaks?  No hyphenation is still
>>> better than compound word hyphenation, no?
>>
>> Yes, but all word compounds are also in the regular patterns, which
>> raises their penalties values to above zero.
>
> As an partial answer to Stefan Hennig's comment: There are (existing
> and documented in the typographical literature) situations where no
> hyphenation is worse than some hyphenation. In german typesetting
> this applies to \emph{Rauhsatz} which is a kind of
> flushleft-raggedright typesetting.

aiming at a small ragged zone.  Thanks for reminding me about this 
application of compound word hyphenation!


> Because german words tend to be long, hyphenation at preferred
> hyphenation points is much better than no hyphenation at all.

That should be dealt with by balancing stretchability (line badness) 
against hyphenation penalties.  Indeed, compound word hyphenation 
penalty could be zero in Rauhsatz, as an extreme, but shouldn't be 
negative, IMHO.

Best regards,
Stephan Hennig


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