[albert_e]

Are hypens no longer acceptable?

There is no mention of it in the post. If words (in any language) can be arbitrarily long and columns can be arbitrarily narrow, we will need to solve for this anyway.

Even without those extremes, I feel that there will always be place for the good old hypen when displaying or printing text for the main purpose of readability. No need to max out on perfect "look" in every application of text.

In fact in many places one might even find columns with jagged right edges more readable -- letting you visually distinguish each line from the one above/below it easily by length alone -- and may even lend a certain aesthetic character that is the opposite of mechanical / boring / machine produced / sterile.

Of course not negating the need for a well implemented method without bugs to justify text correctly when the use case demands it.

[levocardia]

Butterick says you should never, ever justify text without hyphenation

https://practicaltypography.com/justified-text.html

[doesnt_know]

What is an example of a "high-end page-layout program" referenced in that document? I mean, of course I assume they exist for professional type setting, book publishing and such, but I have never seen or heard of the actual software.

[albert_e]

Thanks for that link! There is a bit more ... justification (pun intended) on that page for this recommendation to turn-on hypenation; and also some valuable advice on choosing spacing between words over spacing between letters.

[tosti]

The problem is knowing when to do it. The lang attribute and Content-Language header may not always be reliable. Authors mostly aren't using the WBR element.

[bjourne]

Hyphenization is language and content-dependent. You need different rules for English and French text, for example. Moreover, it doesn't fit the "short paragraph style" most non-academic text is written in these days.

[onion2k]

Are hypens no longer acceptable?

Hyphenation will probably lead to people thinking the content is generated by AI, which would be a significant downside for most websites. Users want to believe the site creator put effort in (regardless of whether they did or even if it's appropriate to have done.)

[pleurotus]

They're not referring to the m-dash that LLMs are known for, but hyphenation in the middle of a word to split the word over two lines.

The article shows it in the example screenshots, but does not explicitly mention it or how it interacts with the different options discussed

[ameliaquining]

Auto-hyphenation is part of what text-wrap: pretty does.

[notpushkin]

No, it’s not. You can turn it on or off independently.