Re: Soft hyphens

[Peter Schaffter]

On Sun, Apr 04, 2021, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> I think the sentence
> 
>    Explicitly hyphenated words such as "mother-in-law" are eligible for
>    breaking after each of their hyphens when GNU 'troff' fills lines.
> 
> does most of the work you're asking for...

It does, but for clarity and and completeness, the sentence must
mention soft hyphens.  A word with a soft hyphen cannot be said to
be "explicitly hyphenated"; the nature of a soft hyphen is that it's
optional, not explicit.  Even if it can be argued that a soft hyphen
is explicit because it's introduced by the user, the potential for
misunderstanding warrants clarification.

Something like

  Explicitly hyphenated words such as "mother-in-law" or
 "brother\%hood" are eligible for breaking after each of their
  hyphens...
or
  Explicitly hyphenated words such as "mother-in-law" and words
  containing the soft hyphen character are eligible for breaking
  after each of their hyphens...

would be more useful than requiring readers to extrapolate (a
Very Bad Thing in documentation) that the discretionary hyphen
counts as an explicit hyphen.

Equally, the corresponding entry for .nh needs to include that
explicit and soft hyphens continue to be interpreted as valid break
points.  Conceptually, soft hyphens feel like part of automatic
hyphenation, even if groff doesn't treat them as such.  Users need
to be alerted in order to prevent surprises.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
https://www.schaffter.ca