[scribus] Poor hyphenation in french language

[Louis Desjardins]

2012/7/11 Kjö Hansi Glaz <kjo at a4nancy.net.eu.org>

> Hi,
>
> [...]
> >
> > Some examples:
> > Some short words like avant, comme, guerre, cannot by hyphenated
> > at all. Words like nation, situation, libération (ending -tion)
> > are hyphenated before the last two characters (-ti-on), which is
> > wrong. Many verbs in the third person plural end like -ient, -aient
> > etc but a hyphen is wrongly placed into that last syllable.
> >
> > I've finished the book by inserting many soft-hyphens with ctrl-
> > shift-"-" and also filling the exceptions list. But this solution
> > is very fragile. If any small change should be made in the text
> > or the layout, many hyphens and line endings have to be checked
> > again.
> >
> > Is this really a problem of scribus or am I doing something
> > basically wrong?
> >
> I thought I experienced the same problem but I cannot reproduce it now
> with scribus 1.4.0 on debian wheezy/testing. None of the words you
> experienced problems with are hypenated wrong. If you can give me an
> example docuemnt to try I would be happy to contribute.
>

Hi,

I cannot reproduce the bug with words ending in -tion.

I can reproduce the issue with avant, comme, guerre with hyphenation
settings as generous as
 - Shortest word 3 letters
 - Number of consecutive hyphens 10.
-  Language: French

What would be expected (in an absolute way) is a-vant, com-me, guer-re (?)

However, this goes against the typographic rules for French hyphenation.
In this case, 2 rules would be not respected :
 - Never leave a single letter before or after the hyphen > a-vant is wrong
 - Do not separate a silent syllabe from the word > com-me and guer-re are
wrong

Basically, Scribus is doing well in hyphenation (with some limitations
already discussed in the bug tracker).

I tested with other words that have a silent termination such as pratique
and pratiquent. The program correctly hyphenates pra-tique and pra-tiquent
and does not hyphenate on all the syllabes as some other programs do
wrongly: pra-ti-que and pra-ti-quent. However, the verb pratiquer is
correctly hyphenated as pra-ti-quer and pra-ti-que-raient. While this is
great from a very strict language point of view, I would be more pleased if
the program would allow the user to make that kind of decision. In
newspapers with very narrow justification, it can be pretty hard to comply
with those rules while leaving holes in the text and destroy the
typographic color of the text. In this particular case, you have to pick
one or the other. Thus, pra-ti-quent could be acceptable in some
circumstances.

What we miss is a way to act on those settings which could be part of a
more sophistated "typographic color" style feature yet to be implemented.

Cheers!

Louis

>
> Cheers,
>
> K.
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