Can any-one give me an example how to make and use a .dic file for hyphenation rules?
Best regards

The easiest way is to grab a pre-existing one for the language that you're interested in, from OpenOffice.

Thanks, I know how to get that one via Wikipedia. I will download that file and place it f.i. on my c-drive: c:\en.dic. What I do not understand fully is how to write the command: should it be something like:

p {hyphen: auto; prince-hyphenate-patterns: url(c:\en.dic);}

Is it really that simple? I will try that this evening and hope that then the hyphenations will be correct.

Now the second part of the question: how can you make those hyphenation patterns yourself?

That should be all it takes, although the property is called "hyphens" not "hyphen".

To make hyphenation patterns yourself you need to understand the format. If you take a look at the file, you'll see one pattern on each line. Patterns match fragments of words. If the pattern begins with a period, then it will only match the beginning of a word, not in the middle. Similarly, if it ends with a period, then it will only match the end of a word. Odd digits in the pattern indicate hyphenation opportunities, even digits indicate that the word should not be broken at that position. The higher the number, the higher the priority.

However, I don't think anyone actually writes pattern files directly, I think there is a TeX utility to generate them from more understandable source data. Just out of interest, which language are you planning to hyphenate?

Thanks, yesterday evening I found the thesis of Liang on the internet describing the algorithme for the patterns, your description is clearer.

The text is in english and I have used a uk-version for hyphenation. The trouble is that a lot of words in the text are not english. They are names of persons or scientific names of animals. The word Umbgrove became Um-bgrove in stead of Umb-grove and Northwest became Northw-est. Lepidocyclina became Lepidocicl-ina. It would be handy to put an exceptionlist for for these cases.

I tried to add m4b5gr and variations to the .dic list which resulted that the word Umbgrove was transposed to the next line completely. rth5w4 did not do the trick for northwest.

A week ago I even did not know what hypenations were

Sounds like you are doing very well!

An exception list would make sense, we don't currently support this in Prince but I'll add it to the roadmap.

Hi Michael

In case this helps to set priorities: The possibility to have a file with language specific hyphenation exceptions would improve the" finishing workflow" greatly.

Kind regards
Thomas

Thanks, we will adjust priorities accordingly.

Have you tried
.thiswordisnothyphenated.
I believe that will force no hyphens
Just a period on either end of the word.

Jim Albright
Wycliffe Bible Translators