wp-Hyphenate 1.07 beta

Hyphenation is finally avail­able for the web. The addi­tion of hyphen­ation is a sig­nif­i­cant step for­ward for the state of web typog­ra­phy. With it your left aligned text will be less ragged, and your jus­ti­fied text will avoid the ghastly word spac­ing that has pre­vented seri­ous web design­ers from using it.

wp-​Hyphenate includes tremen­dous abil­ity to cus­tomize its appli­ca­tion of hyphen­ation and adds fea­tures aid browsers to prop­erly wrap long urls and keep widows com­pany (a widow is the last word of a block of text that stands alone on the last line).

A screen­shot of the wp-​Hyphenate admin page:

FAQs

Why hyphenate?

Hyphen­ation increases the visual appeal of your web­site. When jus­ti­fy­ing text with­out hyphen­ation, word spac­ing is dis­tract­ingly large. With left-​aligned text, the right edge will be unnec­es­sar­ily ragged.

How does hyphen­ation work?

The soft-​hyphen is an invis­i­ble char­ac­ter that com­mu­ni­cates to web browsers allow­able line breaks within words. When a web browser wraps a line at a soft-​hyphen, a hyphen is shown at line’s end.

Sim­i­lar to the soft-​hyphen, the zero-​space char­ac­ter com­mu­ni­cates allow­able line breaks within strings of text. But unlike the soft-​hyphen, it does not show a hyphen at line’s end. This is ideal for forc­ing con­sis­tent wrap­ping of long URLs. It also can be used to force line breaks in unco­op­er­a­tive web browsers after hard-​hyphens in words like “zero-space” and “soft-hyphen”.

Which browsers sup­port hyphenation?

Not all browsers sup­port online hyphen­ation. Notably, before ver­sion 3, Fire­fox did not sup­port hyphen­ation. For­tu­nately, it failed grace­fully — hyphen­ated text dis­played as if it was unhyphenated.

That is more than could be said for early ver­sions of Safari (1.2 and ear­lier). Those ver­sions of Safari dis­played a hyphen at every pos­si­ble hyphen­ation point — even if it was not at line’s end. wp-​Hyphenate includes an option to strip all hyphen­ation from early ver­sion of Safari using JavaScript.

Start­ing with Inter­net Explorer 6, Fire­fox 3, Safari 2, and Opera 8, all major web browsers have offered full sup­port for online hyphenation.

Does hyphen­ation effect search?

It depends on the search engine. Google and Yahoo prop­erly handle the soft-​hyphen char­ac­ter with­out penalty. Microsoft and Ask improp­erly treat soft-​hyphens as word breaks. For­tu­nately, Google and Yahoo com­prise more than 90% of the search market.

Can I con­trol how a spe­cific word is hyphenated?

Yes. The admin­is­tra­tive panel for wp-​Hyphenate includes an editable excep­tions list.

What are widows and why pro­tect them?

A widow is the final word in a block of text that falls to its own line. Espe­cially if the widow is only a few char­ac­ters long, she can get lonely. wp-​Hyphenate will try to pro­tect widows by bring­ing them com­pany from the pre­vi­ous line.

There is danger that the widow’s com­pany will leave the pre­vi­ous line with less than opti­mal word spac­ing. The risk is less if your text is left-​aligned, but if it is jus­ti­fied, tread care­fully. The pro­tec­tion of widows is com­pletely cus­tomiz­able in the admin­is­tra­tive options.

Is there any other imple­men­ta­tion of this HTML hyphen­ation technology?

Yes. KING­desk has also imple­mented this same tech­nol­ogy as a simple web app at http://​hyph-​n.com. Submit your static HTML in the pro­vided web form, and it will return hyphen­ated results for your use.

Does wp-​Hyphenate work with the Typogrify plugin?

Yes. How­ever, they will both try to pre­vent widows. Widow han­dling should be turned off in the Typogrify admin­is­tra­tive options. The wp-​Hyphenate han­dling of widows allows for more gran­u­lar con­trol, allow­ing the user to bal­ance widow han­dling with the addi­tional word-​spacing cre­ated on the pre­vi­ous line.

What hyphen­ation algo­rithm is used in wp-​Hyphenate?

The hyphen­ation algo­rithm used by wp-​Hyphenate is based on the 1983 Stan­ford Ph.D. thesis of pro­fes­sor Frank Liang: Word Hy-phen-a-tion by Com-​puter. Liang’s PatGen algo­rithm was updated in 1991 by Peter Bre­it­en­lohner. The result­ing algo­rithm finds 90% of all allowed hyphen­ation points iden­ti­fied in the Webster’s Unabridged Dic­tio­nary with a 0% error rate.

What lan­guage pat­terns are included with this library?

wp-​Hyphenate now has multi-​language sup­port. Pat­tern libraries are included for Basque, Bul­gar­ian, Cata­lan, Chi­nese, Pinyin (Latin), Croa­t­ian, Czech, Danish, Eng­lish (United King­dom), Eng­lish (United States), Eston­ian, Finnish, French, Gali­cian, German, Greek (Ancient), Greek, Modern Monot­o­nic, Greek, Modern Poly­tonic, Ice­landic, Indone­sian, Inter­lin­gua, Irish, Ital­ian, Latin, Lithuan­ian, Mon­go­lian (Cyril­lic), Polish, Por­tuguese, Roman­ian, Russ­ian, San­skrit, Ser­bian (Cyril­lic), Ser­bocroa­t­ian (Cyril­lic), Ser­bocroa­t­ian (Latin), Slovak, Sloven­ian, Span­ish, Swedish, Turk­ish, Ukrain­ian, and Welsh.

Can I port this plugin to another CMS?

Yes. wp-​Hyphenate is licensed under the GNU Gen­eral Public License 2.0. If modify it, you must retain the KING­desk, LLC copy­right infor­ma­tion, the request for a link to http://​king​desk.com, and the web design ser­vices con­tact infor­ma­tion unchanged. If you redis­trib­ute this soft­ware, or any deriv­a­tive, it must be released under the GNU Gen­eral Public License 2.0.

Will this plugin slow my page load­ing times?

Yes. There is a fair amount of pro­cess­ing that takes place every time a post is called from your MySQL data­base. In our inter­nal tests, we have seen one-​half a second added to single post pages, and over 1 second added to multi-​post pages. While page load times will likely remain accept­able to your users, it is still rec­om­mended that you use a caching plugin (like WP-​Cache or WP Super Cache) with wp-​Hyphenate. There is no delay in the serv­ing of cached pages.

Can I make a dona­tion to sup­port this plugin?

No. We don’t want your money. If you want to show your sup­port, we would greatly appre­ci­ate a link to king​desk.com from your web­site — per­haps in a nice review of this plugin.

This site is damn sexy. Can I hire KING­desk to design a web­site for my company?

Yes. Please con­tact us.

Version History

Ver­sion 1.07 beta, Novem­ber 25, 2008

Worked around last multi­byte string func­tion from Eng­lish hyphen­ation to address obscure encod­ing error

Ver­sion 1.06 beta, Novem­ber 25, 2008

Pro­vided for single byte alpha­bets to not use multi­byte string func­tions to increase performance

Now runs 43% faster for Eng­lish hyphenation

Inter­na­tion­al­ized text in admin options

Prop­erly removes mul­ti­ple links that may have been improp­erly included by the URL link­ing functionality

Sim­pli­fied dehyphen.js to only remove zero-​width spaces from IE6

Ver­sion 1.05 beta, Novem­ber 10, 2008

Inserted actual soft-​hyphen and zero-​width space char­ac­ters, rather than their HTML rep­re­sen­ta­tions. This cleans up the appear­ance of the source code.

Removed errant auto-​linking of URLs in the HTML title attribute

Excluded hyphen­ation, URL wrap­ping and widow pro­tec­tion from feeds

Cor­rected error to allow zero-​width spaces to be stripped from IE6 via JavaScript

Forced wrap­ping after under­score char­ac­ters in the midst of words

Cor­rected hyphen­ation of words con­tain­ing select non-​Latin characters

Ver­sion 1.04 beta, Novem­ber 16, 2008

Short­ened the default string length for the hyph_​chunkSubject func­tion from 4000 char­ac­ters to 3000. This cured an issue where some text was being dropped (depend­ing on server configuration).

Unlinked urls now link auto­mat­i­cally when the “Always Link URLs” option is selected in the Admin options.

Ver­sion 1.03 beta, Novem­ber 9, 2008

Gen­eral code clean-​up to sep­a­rate core func­tion­al­ity for easy port­ing to php based con­tent man­age­ment systems

Added simple val­i­da­tion for user defined list of tags whose con­tent should not be hyphenated

Updated all cal­cu­la­tions to prop­erly handle multi­byte char­ac­ters as required for multi-​language

Added multi-​language sup­port and hyphen­ation pat­terns for the fol­low­ing lan­guages: Basque, Bul­gar­ian, Cata­lan, Chi­nese, Pinyin (Latin), Croa­t­ian, Czech, Danish, Eng­lish (United King­dom), Eng­lish (United States), Eston­ian, Finnish, French, Gali­cian, German, Greek (Ancient), Greek, Modern Monot­o­nic, Greek, Modern Poly­tonic, Ice­landic, Indone­sian, Inter­lin­gua, Irish, Ital­ian, Latin, Lithuan­ian, Mon­go­lian (Cyril­lic), Polish, Por­tuguese, Roman­ian, Russ­ian, San­skrit, Ser­bian (Cyril­lic), Ser­bocroa­t­ian (Cyril­lic), Ser­bocroa­t­ian (Latin), Slovak, Sloven­ian, Span­ish, Swedish, Turk­ish, Ukrain­ian, and Welsh.

Ver­sion 1.02 beta, Novem­ber 5, 2008

Resolved prob­lem where occa­sional char­ac­ter was dropped in long posts.

Ver­sion 1.01 beta, Novem­ber 4, 2008

Removed all new PHP 5 func­tions and replaced with code that is com­pat­i­ble with PHP ver­sion 4.3 and later .

Ver­sion 1.0 beta, Novem­ber 1, 2008

Orig­i­nal Release

Your feed­back is much appre­ci­ated. How can we make this plugin better?