Hyphenation

Introduction

This page is designed to be a test and description of the JavaScript hyphenation and line breaking algorithms.

Hyphenation

The hyphenation is done by Hyphenator.js, which uses the algorithm developed by Liangs for use in TeX. It is currently using the British English dictionary (i.e. en-gb). This seems to work quite well.

Line breaking

The line breaking algorithm is the Knuth & Plass algorithm, which was also developed for use in TeX (it’s pretty good at public domain typesetting algorithms, this “TeX” program).

The implementation is strongly based on Typeset by Bram Stein. Most of the implementation was taken from his publication of Flatland, but it had to be modified to get it to be more general (to work with Markdown-generated pages, for instance).

There are still some problems with its current form: the words “Hyphenator.js”, “Typeset”, “his publication” and “Flatland” are actually links, but the line breaking algorithm destroys all markup at the moment (I’m working on it!).