Hi Robert, At 2024-08-30T16:29:03+1000, Robert Thorsby wrote: > I wouldn't call myself a typographer but I refuse to allow hyphens to > break, usually via '.hy 0' or by using '\%'. I then kern the tripe out > of any offending line, often using Ted Harding's "poor man's kerning" > trick.
Ooh, that sounds like something good to remind the youngsters of. Have a link handy? > However, no matter what you do, you simply *cannot* end the last line > of a column or page with a hyphen. That, too, is a policy choice, and a sound one, but neither AT&T nor GNU troff mandate it in the formatter's own defaults. groff(7): Several requests influence automatic hyphenation. Because conventions vary, a variety of hyphenation modes is available to the .hy request; these determine whether hyphenation will apply to a word prior to breaking a line at the end of a page (more or less; see below for details), and at which positions within that word automatically determined hyphenation points are permissible. The localization macro files loaded by troffrc configure a default hyphenation mode appropriate to the language. 0 disables hyphenation. 1 enables hyphenation except after the first and before the last character of a word. The remaining values “imply” 1; that is, they enable hyphenation under the same conditions as “.hy 1”, and then apply or lift restrictions relative to that basis. 2 disables hyphenation of the last word on a page. (Hyphenation is prevented if the next page location trap is closer to the vertical drawing position than the next text baseline would be. See section “Traps” below.) AT&T troff's default was 1, as has groff's been, but we have a NEWS item in the forthcoming 1.24 release. NEWS: * A new request, `hydefault`, and read-only register, `.hydefault`, manage the default automatic hyphenation mode of an environment. This resolves a long-standing problem of *roff formatting. When processing input like this, .nh and we temporarily shut off automatic hyphenation, .hy the foregoing request would not do exactly what we expect. AT&T and other troffs would set the hyphenation mode to 1 instead of the previous value; for GNU troff this was not an appropriate value for the English hyphenation patterns. (For example, "alibi" would break as "ali-bi" instead of "al-ibi" after this argumentless `hy` invocation.) With updates to groff's localization files accompanying this release, the foregoing input now works as desired. (All of that said, hyphenation modes of 6 and 14 have long been common in troff documents or macro packages.) > So IMHSHO your question does not arise. IMO, it _does_. ;-) Regards, Branden
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