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. -- Leah Neukirchen https://leahneukirchen.org

On 10/19/22 16:47, Leah Neukirchen via ntg-context wrote:

...

[...] 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.

Hi Leah, Hans added hyphenmin some time ago: \setuplanguage[de][lefthyphenmin=2, righthyphenmin=3, hyphenmin=6] \setuplanguage[deo][lefthyphenmin=2, righthyphenmin=3, hyphenmin=5] \mainlanguage[de] \starttext \startTEXpage[offset=1em] \hyphenatedword{davon} \deo\hyphenatedword{davon} \stopTEXpage \stoptext It is technically on the wiki, but it lacks proper “wikification”. I hope it helps, Pablo

Max Chernoff via ntg-context schrieb am 29.09.2022 um 02:17:

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:

\mainlanguage[de] \lefthyphenmin=2 \righthyphenmin=2

You can use \setuplanguage to change the values. \setuplanguage   [de]   [ lefthyphenmin=2,    righthyphenmin=2] Wolfgang

On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 06:49:23AM +0200, Henning Hraban Ramm via ntg-context wrote:

Thank you, Leah, Max and Wolfgang! I changed that immediately in all of my ongoing projects, but I don’t think we should change the default after all these years.

Are you sure that the default in ConTeXt has *not* changed in all these years? :-) Arthur