Proposal for (source-side) hyphenation support

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nico Huber [mailto:nico.h at gmx.de]
> Sent: Friday, March 31, 2017 11:33
> To: dennis.hamilton at acm.org; Discussion related to Markdown. <markdown-
> discuss at six.pairlist.net>
> Subject: Re: Proposal for (source-side) hyphenation support
> 
> On 31.03.2017 19:27, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
> >
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Markdown-Discuss [mailto:markdown-discuss-
> >> bounces at six.pairlist.net] On Behalf Of Nico Huber
> >> Sent: Friday, March 31, 2017 09:58
> >> To: markdown-discuss <markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net>
> >> Subject: Proposal for (source-side) hyphenation support
> >>
> >> Hi there,
> >>
> >> don't know if this has been discussed before, or if I just overlooked
> >> how to do it: I'm missing support for hyphenation in Markdown files.
> >> Looking at always ragged HTML pages is already hard enough, so I
> can't
> >> bear anything but halfway justified text in my editor and manually
> hy-
> >> phenate words.
[ ... ]
> >
> > I think we need to think about how this is conveyed into HTML, and
> what
> > browsers might do, since that is where the actual layout width is
> > determined.  It should be assumed that reflow can happen at any time
> and
> > the soft-hyphen might be usable along with whatever other automatic
> > hyphenation the browser uses.
> >
> > A direct method would be to insert soft-hyphen (SHY) codes, code-point
> > 0xAD in Unicode and in Latin-1.
> >
> > I recommend working backward from that to find a Markdown escape that
> > serves this purpose.
> 
> Sorry, I should have made it more clear. I'm not talking about any
> effective change of the output. My purpose is to enhance readability
> of the Markdown source. Any "escape" that differs visually much from
> the usual hyphen before a line break wouldn't serve "this purpose".
[orcmid] 

I don't understand the use-case you describe.  What do you expect the (canonical) HTML to be and how is it determined that a hard hyphen is involved?

Or are you breaking the hyphenation in the markdown but don't want the break in the result; you want to glue the word back together (and reflow of the output makes a break or not)?

Is this more like you want to insert a hard break in the Markdown text, but it is invisible in the output, sort of like the C-Language(s) "\" line-ending?


> 
> The ability to add hyphenation hints in the output might be useful,
> too. But is off topic for me.
> 
> Nico