From: António Martins-Tuválkin (tuvalkin@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Jan 25 2007 - 08:26:17 CST
On 2007/1/23, Adam Twardoch <list.adam@twardoch.com> wrote:
> On a related note: in Polish typesetting practice, hard
> hyphens are always promoted to the next line if soft
> hyphens occur in the text. So if I have a sentence "Tam
> wisi czerwono-niebieska flaga" and the optimal line
> break occurs where the hard hyphen already exists,
> the text will be hyphenated like this:
>
> Tam wisi czerwono-
> -niebieska flaga.
That's exactly what we do in Portuguese; and we do use a lot of
hyphens, which are mandatory for half the verbs forms including a
pronoun.
Skilled typesetters and wp users routinely type *each and every
hyphen* as a sequence of <soft hyphen> <hard hyphen>, which behave as
expected in MS Word, InDesign, PageMaker and QuarkExpress (at least).
The golden rule is «Never type a regular hyphen in Portuguese». Bolder
types (pun intended) apply this practice when typing other languages,
too.
Of course unskilled typesetters and wp users (which account for 99,9%
of everybody sitting in front of a keyboard) use regular hypens and
even resort to <hyphen> <space> <hyphen> to force the intended
behaviour, which come out very lame should the pargraph reflow — a
ususal sight even in newspapaers and books.
This is especially unfortunate since a homography and ambiguity may
arise: E.g., "_disparate_" means "folly" while "_dispara-te_" means
"fire yourself" (or "fires onto you"). The correct way to translineate
is:
«Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, disparate consectetur adipisicing»
identical to
«Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, dispara-
te consectetur adipisicing.»
And
«Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, dispara-te consectetur adipisicing»
identical to
«Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, dispara-
-te consectetur adipisicing.»
Use of regular hypen yields the same result for both originals,
leaving the reader to wonder wheather "_disparate_" or "_dispara-te_"
is intended. Should <hyphen> <space> <hyphen> be inserted in order to
force the expected behaviour, a paragraph reflow made later on will
result in:
«id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
dispara- -te consectetur adipisicing.»
P.S.: This is not anymore about «The "double hyphen" I discuss here
consists of two stacked dashes».
-- António Martins-Tuválkin <antonio(a)tuvalkin.web.pt>
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