(German) Hyphenation in justified text frames

[Johnnymycat]

I have an ongoing issue with hyphenation in justified text. The spaces between the words are just too big. I have tried around with the settings and as you can see below, I have (for my knowledge) already set it to the maximum of hyphenation possible. All the playing around with the numbers changed nothing (made it worse occasionally).

Is there a setting for like the "maximum space between words"?

Finally I figured the problem may be with the Hypenation Dictionary. Maybe the program just hast too few options to hyphenate? But the affinity help page only directs me to the hyphenation dictionary which is already installed. Are there any other you know of?

As you can see in the example text below, there are two paragraphs. In the upper paragraph there are some, very few words hyphenated, although I would wish the text to be way more compact, even with more separations. In the lower paragraph, there is none, although there are many suitable words. Like those, who consist of two different words itself: "Kultur-behörde, Kunst-vereinen, Kunst-halle", even seperable into Kul-tur-be-hör-de or something like that. Also city names like "Ham-burg" or "Düssel-dorf". 

I find the look of these texts very unprofessional, but find no way (can not even think of a ciscumstantial way) to solve that.

Can You? Thank you! 

Kind regards :)

[lacerto]

You can affect the hyphenation with multiple methods that control word and letter spacing. The easiest method would probably be adjusting the tracking where needed:

a) On the left: default tracking, on the right: tracking -10%:

I have probably a bit different font so exact comparison is not possbile. Additionally, whether letting names to hyphenate naturally has effect on how the text is hyphenated.

You can control things like minimum, desired and maximum word and letter spacing using the settings of the Justification group of the Paragraph panel. In languages like German with lots of long (compound) words there might be point in allowing some tightening and loosening of letter spacing. In English text this is normally not allowed or needed. You might also want to consider simply just making the font size a bit smaller (and increasing the relative line spacing a bit to make the text more legible), or using a bit more compact typestyle to fit more characters per line and allow room for alternative hyphenations:

 

I also tried this in InDesign, comparing the default paragraph composer with the single-line composer (I believe Affinity apps only have the latter option). They do not differ much in this case, but the paragraph composer seems to hyphenate a lot more (in the latter paragraph). This text uses -10% tracking and -5% min and +5% max letter spacing, similarly as the Affinity Publisher composed text above on the left:

 

[Andy05]

[EDIT: I misread something, which I noticed after re-reading Legarto's previous comment and his reply. Sorry.]

[lacerto]

2 hours ago, Andy05 said:

But in one of the first example s(-10% Tracking), "priva-tensammlungen" (Affinity! That's not even close - that's horrible!) vs "privaten-sammlungen" (Adobe, correct)?

I corrected the samples as these were my typos after OCR scanning. After the correction, and one additional space, the text improves. Without ajdustments in the InDesign version, Adobe hyphenated the word privaten as priva-ten... Is that wrong? (After adjustments it did not need to hyphenate that word.) There are three options for German language: German: Old Rules, German: 1996 Reform, and German: 2006 Reform. I used the first one, but I have no knowledge which one would be the best option.

Anyway, I am not sure if InDesign hyphenation algorithm is any better than that of Affinity -- aren't both based on hunspell? But the dictionary for compound words may be larger in former (or there might exist some extra knowledge of the way compound words are formed to help use the ideal break points) and that is probably pretty crucial to get good quality in hyphenation. (Long time ago when InDesign did not support Finnish hyphenation, we got along with either Swedish or German, which would work pretty ok, but Finnish has lots of compound words without a dash and those were problematic until we got proper support.)

[Andy05]

1 minute ago, Lagarto said:

I corrected the samples as these were my typos after OCR scanning.

Ignore my stupid post, I misread something. Just to clarify one thing, I didn't try to criticise you, but the Affinity's hyphenation behaviour (which truly isn't great at all).