I can't take seriously a typography webpage that hyphenates the word "typography" between the "g" and the "r". Why split up a morpheme like this? It really undermines the author's credibility to the casual reader, even if it might make the page look prettier to some.
EDIT: lower down, it breaks the same word two chars later, between the "a" and "p". I have never seen such aggressive typography in my life.
The document includes quite aggressive soft hyphenation insertion.
The trouble is that the web doesn’t provide you with the tools for good hyphenation. You can disable hyphenation, enable it and leave it to the browser (I think Firefox is still the only one that’ll do anything with that), or insert soft hyphens all over the place and watch the browser hyphenate gratuitously. Anything like Knuth-Plass where hyphenation and too much space are both acknowledged to to be bad and weighed against each other is still not possible out of the box (and I advise against trying it in JavaScript).
Personally, I think automatic extensive soft hyphen insertion in web documents is misguided, but that’s what MB has chosen here.
The Utah document also is far too aggressive in hyphenation for my liking. The California one is much better, having hyphenated only one line.
A bunch of news sites use their own line wrapping tools, though they cause a “jump” (reflow) late in the page load as the JS kicks in. You’ll see this on the Times for instance: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/text-wrap-balance.html
It's sad that browser hyphenation is still not there yet, and may never be. I'd like to use it for my own personal work but with such variable results between browsers it's better to keep everything 'typewriter-style,' as article calls it.
Per the other thread, the interpuncts mark accepted end-of-line hyphenation positions, not syllables. Merriam-Webster does also indicate syllable breaks with hyphens in its pronunciations, which I assume are (some variant of?) Americanist notation:
\ tī-ˈpä-grə-fē \
In IPA syllable breaks are full stops,
/taɪˈpɑː.ɡrə.fi/
but interestingly, the syllabification for BrE (from Cambridge Dictionary) matches the break positions:
A rationale for custom notation from Merriam-Webster's Twitter:[1]
> IPA has some problems if you grew up speaking English: some of the symbols can be deeply confusing.
> For example: the symbol 'i' (lower-case 'i') stands for the sound /ee/.
> In IPA, the symbol 'j' (lower-case 'j') stands for the sound of /y/ as in 'yes.'
I find it amusing how the Great Vowel Shift sets English apart from other Latin-alphabet languages, where long vowels are overall very alike compared together to modern English: The names of the vowels, 'A E I O U', are also their long sounds; typically (IANALinguist) outside of English they're instead close to something like (spelled Ephonetically) 'ah eh ee aw ooh', which is also reflected in the IPA assignment of /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. Funnily, the same even applies to languages in alphabets and even non-alphabetic writing systems, since the transliterations and transcriptions into the Latin alphabet are also based on vowel qualities from the Latin language itself.
Together other English peculiarities such as 'j' and silent 'e', it seems that when "fake-pronouncing" words from an unknown language by naïvely applying the pronunciation of a known language, using English guarantees being far off the actual pronunciation, with a choice of any other language being significantly more likely than not to result in a closer pronunciation.
English scored the worst on reading by far at 31% (the next lowest was Dutch, at 55%). It also has one of the lowest writing scores at 36%, beating only French (28%) and Chinese (20%).
It also shows what a well-designed phonemic orthography can do: Serbian scored 99% for both reading & writing, indistinguishable from Esperanto.
We are getting to the point where so much content is delivered and consumed unhyphenated, that hyphenation should be considered harmful.
I find it harder to read any kind of hyphenated text now, it sticks out and spoils the reading flow as my brain stumbles through each hyphenation like a drunk hurdler.
British and American hyphenation rules differ. American hyphenation is at syllable boundaries while British hyphenation keeps etymological divisions together. And while typo-graphy might seem better than ty-pog-ra-phy, helico-pter comes across as a bit odd to most readers’ eyes.
Well, the exact locations of syllable boundaries are not always universally agreed upon. Here is one dictionary's entry for "typography" [1] which claims that US speakers break it up as ty-po-gra-phy while British speakers break it up as ty-pog-ra-phy.
In light of that, both the American rule (syllable boundary + American pronunciation) and British rule (morpheme boundary) should put a break in the same place: typo-graphy and not typog-raphy.
Oxford New American dictionary (on my Mac): ty·pog·ra·phy
Random House College dictionary (print): ty·pog·ra·phy
Merriam-Webster (online, the print edition is what the TUG hyphenation exception list uses as its definitive authority): ty· pog· ra· phy
I published a typography magazine in the late 1990s, and never once heard a single person, American or otherwise, pronounce it the way Cambridge claims Americans do.
I see the same thing in Firefox, but varying the page scale makes that hyphenation come and go, and setting `hyphens: none` on the CSS via the inspector disables it.
EDIT: lower down, it breaks the same word two chars later, between the "a" and "p". I have never seen such aggressive typography in my life.