Breaking Words Apart: Exploring Hyphenation Theory and Practice

In this video, we'll explore the fascinating world of hyphenation. Hyphenation is the process of breaking words into syllables and adding hyphens to indicate where a word should be divided at the end of a line. It's an important aspect of typesetting, as it helps to improve the readability and aesthetics of printed text. Research by Frank Liang provided a powerful framework for generating hyphenation rules for a wide range of languages.

Next, we'll turn our attention to the practical side of hyphenation by exploring the hyphenation algorithm developed by Donald Knuth for use in his TeX typesetting system. Knuth's algorithm, first published in 1981, is widely regarded as one of the most effective and efficient hyphenation algorithms ever developed. We'll walk through the key steps of Knuth's algorithm, which involves marking up words with special codes to indicate where hyphenation is allowed and then using dynamic programming techniques to find the optimal hyphenation points for a given line of text.

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Outro music: Sanaas Scylla

#hyphenation #examples #java

[aaronperl]

I really enjoyed this. I used to use LaTeX a lot to write... Almost everything. I was always interested in how it does line breaking and hyphenation. I have written line breaking code in various languages, usually using a greedy algorithm, and usually for display on an 80-column terminal, but I've never looked into hyphenation. I knew TeX (and therefore LaTeX) use dynamic programming to find the best solution, but I never looked into how it knew how to score things, so this was very interesting.

I also agree, a correct and readable solution is always better than a faster but unmaintainable (or worse, unreliable) one. Unless your code doesn't meet the performance requirements. Then you optimize 😁