Training dictionary and word wrapping in Publisher

[HardyW]

Assume that I am training the dictionary. How do I indicate that a word can be wrapped at certain positions? Otherwise, the word will never be wrapped.

 

PS: Anyway, I have the impression that the German dictionary hardly contains any word wraps or is hardly supporting it. "No break" is deactivated in characters and text style.

[thomaso]

You can cause a discretionary (conditional, optional) hyphenation by inserting a Discretionary Hyphen ("Soft Hyphen", "bedingter Trennstrich") at the wanted position within the word. (menu Text > Insert > …)

If you expect generally more hyphenation within a paragraph you might check / adjust the hyphenation settings. (Paragraph panel > Hyphenation)

The German dictionary used by Affinity is known for missing or wrong hyphenation, in particular for certain compounds. Since those aren't marked by spell-check and I am unable to enter a discretionary hyphen in the "Spelling" dialog (-> "Learn") I don't know* a way to add correct hyphenation to the dictionary.

* while the hyphenation dictionary seems to be an editable text document I still don't know its rules, in particular its handling of words vs. syllables vs. pre- and suffixes.

[MikeTO]

You cannot "train" the hyphenation dictionary. While there's a separate user exceptions dictionary for spelling, the hyphenation exceptions go into the main Hunspell hyphenation dictionary.

The hyphenation dictionary is editable text but I caution against editing it unless you invest time to learn the notation. Hunspell hyphenation uses hyphenation patterns instead of word lists with specific breakpoints to reduce the file size because it was developed in the 1980s when system memory was a constraint. The patterns aren't perfect which is why you sometimes get poor results. Over time as memory became less of a constraint, many more exceptions were added to improve hyphenation but it's still far from ideal. For example, "florier" is the first exception in the German dictionary but it's written as .3flo1ri2er.

If you do edit the hyphenation dictionary, edit only the exceptions, adding a pattern might cause issues with other words.

[HardyW]

Hi, thanks for the info.

Yes, modifying the hyphenation dictionary is a bit troublesome. Though adding word boundaries is easy (just put an odd number between the word boundaries, higher numbers get higher priority).