On Sun, Apr 04, 2021, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > I think the sentence > > Explicitly hyphenated words such as "mother-in-law" are eligible for > breaking after each of their hyphens when GNU 'troff' fills lines. > > does most of the work you're asking for...
It does, but for clarity and and completeness, the sentence must mention soft hyphens. A word with a soft hyphen cannot be said to be "explicitly hyphenated"; the nature of a soft hyphen is that it's optional, not explicit. Even if it can be argued that a soft hyphen is explicit because it's introduced by the user, the potential for misunderstanding warrants clarification. Something like Explicitly hyphenated words such as "mother-in-law" or "brother\%hood" are eligible for breaking after each of their hyphens... or Explicitly hyphenated words such as "mother-in-law" and words containing the soft hyphen character are eligible for breaking after each of their hyphens... would be more useful than requiring readers to extrapolate (a Very Bad Thing in documentation) that the discretionary hyphen counts as an explicit hyphen. Equally, the corresponding entry for .nh needs to include that explicit and soft hyphens continue to be interpreted as valid break points. Conceptually, soft hyphens feel like part of automatic hyphenation, even if groff doesn't treat them as such. Users need to be alerted in order to prevent surprises. -- Peter Schaffter https://www.schaffter.ca
