Re: [NTG-context] Suboptimal German hyphenation

19 Oct 2022


      Leah Neukirchen via ntg-context  writes:
...
Max Chernoff via ntg-context  writes:
...
Hi Leah,
...
I was typesetting some German text on a narrow page when I discovered
the justification wasn't as good as expected.  I think I tracked this
down to differences in hyphenation points, namely, ConTeXt has fewer:
\starttext
\language[de]
\showhyphens{Zusammenhang}
\showhyphens{anderswo}
\showhyphens{anderswoher}
\stoptext
This shows
languages       > hyphenation > show: Zusam[-||]men[-||]hang
languages       > hyphenation > show: anderswo
languages       > hyphenation > show: anders[-||]wo[-||]her
Babel/ngerman sets left/righthyphenmin to 2/2, but ConTeXt sets those to
3/3 for German. (The English default is 2/3). I don't speak German so I
have no idea which is correct, but you can get the same behaviour in
ConTeXt with:
Perfect, thanks!
Many prefixes have two letters, so changing the default may be
reasonable.  But there are more experienced German typographers on
this list who can chime in.
After some research, I found the recommendation in
Forssman, de Jong: Detailtypografie (4. Aufl, 2008, S. 124f.) to
use 2/3 for German justified texts, and 3/4 to 5/5 for ragged text.
They also recommend to never hyphenate words with 5 letters, not sure
that can be encoded.

-- 
Leah Neukirchen    https://leahneukirchen.org