The HTML specification (any of them) does not require or allow a user agent to manage text hyphenation. Instead, it must rely on hints provided by the document:
In German – and in Germanic languages in general – words are long! If you have a page layout with narrow columns (a left-hand side navigation for instance), lines might extend further than you'd like them to.
The following Python function inserts soft hyphens into a text string, guided by a hyphenation dictionary:
If you can't see the script embedded above, you can see the source here.![]()
The soft hyphen tells the user agent where a line break can occur.In English, (very) long words are relatively infrequent, and as such, hyphenation is not particularly important. The lack of good hyphenation rarely breaks a page layout.
In German – and in Germanic languages in general – words are long! If you have a page layout with narrow columns (a left-hand side navigation for instance), lines might extend further than you'd like them to.
The following Python function inserts soft hyphens into a text string, guided by a hyphenation dictionary:
If you can't see the script embedded above, you can see the source here.
