I recall in typing class we spent a lot of time on hyphenation at the end of a line. It’s somewhat of an art to maintain a straight right margin. Knowing when and how often to hyphenate a word at the end of the line required a delicate touch. Do it too often and the letter was hard to read.
I know proportional fonts gives a smoother right margin. It’s not perfect. There are times you still need to hyphenate long words.
Do they even teach this skill in writing classes anymore? Does everyone rely on proportional fonts to make the right margin, good enough? There are still a few fixed fonts in word processors. They work just like a typewriter.
Are you kidding? Word – at least, Word 2007 – almost always makes the wrong choice. WordPerfect 5.1, from twenty years ago, was enormously better both in the choices it made and the control it allowed.
I think readability is much better if there are no hyphens at all. I use a proportional font and justified alignment. My word processor is under strict instructions not to auto-hyphenate. Only in very rare cases, where a long word makes the spacing all screwy, will I manually insert a hyphen.
I don’t doubt that some programs make better choices than others. Word seems to make nonsensical choices about grammar that I frequently ignore or override.
But the wrong choices may become the right choices over time, if they don’t go challenged. That’s the problem with “progress.”
Any examples of wrong choices that I could try out?
Hyphenation is not necessary for wide columns, but it is absolutely necessary for narrow ones, using typical text.
Some word processors have considerable options about hyphenation. PageMaker 6.5 (20 years ago, and still in use) has an option about how many successive lines to allow hyphenation, and a few other settings. Judicious use of these options can make a document more readable without giving up the flexibility of hyphens.
I have been observing hyphenation by computer for at least 20 years. Although I am usually hyper-sensitive about matters like this (grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.), I don’t recall a large number of “mistakes” or egregiously unwise decisions by a computer hyphenation program.
Therefore, I am suggesting that, despite a lack of rigid rules, maybe it doesn’t matter much how the hyphenation point is chosen? Perhaps there are multiple locations within some words, and it simply doesn’t matter with regards to readability within a reasonable range?
This is actually a contentious issue in the industry. A lot of people think correct hyphenation is extremely important to readability. But it’s also a little like the computer holy wars, in which some people think the operating system is enormously important and most ordinary people go, what’s an operating system?
Even with proportional typefonts, there are enormous variations in the way various programs allocate the spacing between words to create justified columns of type for books, pamphlets, newsletters, and the like. Just as the serious computer freaks insist upon Unix as their OS, serious book compositors insist upon LaTeX (pronounced lay-tech) for book layout. You can find tedious long expositions online about the differences between LaTeX and Word.
The very short version is that the programs look at a few major variables, which are easier to adjust in a specialized program. How far back do you allow your hyphenation point to be, 0.25 inches? More? Less? Each creates breaks in different places. Do you allow hyphens at the end of every line? No more than three consecutive lines? Two? Some people consider this makes for a major difference in readability. What typefaces minimize the look of the extra spacing between words that a justifier must add? How are different typefonts handled by the different programs in the first place? Not identically, despite what you might think.
After you’ve made all these decisions, two questions arise, neither easily answered. How much better looking is the product and how much more readability does it have? These are totally separate questions and each individual designer puts more weight on one than the other. But nobody goes out to the public and surveys responses for each individual book, so nobody really has good answers to any of these questions. It comes back to expertise and preferences and, well, religion.
A professional can do better than I can, because I can only work in Word. But my best in Word is pretty good and you might not be able to tell that it was amateur work.
Does anybody teach this? I doubt it for anywhere other than book design courses. It’s a truly high-level professional skill. And one that virtually nobody needs to know. A mostly good effort is simply good enough. One problem is that the worst programs of all are used by newspapers, which have the greatest need. Newspaper hyphenation today is truly phenomenally awful. But that’s never going to be a concern for anyone except a handful of people.
For everybody else, use Word, but get into it far enough to check off the options box inside the hyphenation function. Get that to the point you want it. Anything more will drive you crazy. I’ve been there.
There is no longer an “industry standard” concerning hyphenation. I used to have a formula for figuring when and how much to hyphenate, depending on the font, size and column width, and can’t find it now. The bottom line, as usual, is: Look at the type that you have produced. If it’s ragged-right and the lines are too ragged, add some hyphenation; also if it’s justified, and you’re seeing a lot of outrageous word- and letter-spacing.
This is my greatest pet-peeve concerning typesetting and graphics in general: Don’t just sit there wiggling your fingers on the keyboard and expect the printer to spew forth perfection. Actually look at what you have done, as if you are seeing it for the first time, and fix what’s wrong with it. Regardless of what software you’re using, you don’t have to accept everything “as is” (this is especially true with kerning (don’t get me started). It’s amazing how many people don’t do this . . . and it’s very obvious when they don’t.
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the style was to justify the right hand margin to show that you were using a computer which was powerful enough to justify the right hand margin. Maybe because books and newspapers used justified columns.
When justification fell out of style, the need for hyphenation dropped. Flexible word spacing and the fact most words are fairly short just meant that you really don’t require hyphens.
Besides, when you are no longer doing a carriage return at the end of each line, it’s hard to say where to add in the hyphen. Paragraphs automatically reformat themselves depending upon the font size, margins, etc.
Simply justified text is the least readable form of all text blocks. The amount of spacing required to make the ends come out even creates what are called “rivers” or vertical blank areas that seem to appear in line after line and connect into a pathway that pulls the eye down the page.
It’s not impossible to have justified but unhyphenated text be readable, but it’s the least friendly option. Ragged right is far better if you don’t want to hyphenate.
I think this is it. Print out a document on a different printer and Word will make slight changes that may throw all your hyphenations off. Also, if you edit a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph you might have to go back and de-hyphenate words that no longer occur at the ednd of lines. Finally, for stuff on the web it is an extremely bad idea to assume you know the exact format of text on the screen.
There were 2 or 3 of us who sometimes, for amusement or out of boredom, produced unhyphenated text in which each line had exactly the same number of characters, so justification is “perfect.” Obviously one achieves this effect by substituting synonyms, etc.
With fixed-pitch fonts out of fashion, this has probably become a “lost art.”
