Hyphenation
===========

Monday 6 July 2009 12:28

About fixing the menu to make long words wrap, last
weekend I started with a Perl module that will take
care of that. There was already TeX::Hyphen, and I
combined that with HTML::TreeBuilder to end up with
something that will take a bunch of HTML and insert
soft hyphens at the right places. It can be used to
just enable the browser to break long words in
narrow layout, but it can also be used to just
insert all the possible soft hyphens so you would
get a much less ragged text layout.

There are JavaScript solutions for this (as
featured on Hamburg Uni), but downloading a 68kB
pattern file for just a single language seems a bit
much for such a purpose. Not the download (although
I don't see a server side solution adding 68kB of
­ to a page like that), but parsing it all and
doing it real time might make the client side
experience a bit sluggish at times.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2009/07/06/hyphenation/