Hyphenation of Indian languages
Posted on February 18, 2022
| Santhosh Thottingal
The latest version of Firefox - Firefox 97 - supports hyphenation of Indian languages. I had filed a bug report to include the hyphenation patterns I prepared in Firefox. That 6 year old bug report is now resolved.
Hyphenation is the process inserting hyphens in between the syllables of a word so that when the text is justified, maximum space is utilized.
Following languages are supported:
Assamese Bengali Gujarati Hindi Kannada Malayalam Marati Odia Panjabi Tamil Telugu I had written several articles about how to do hyphenation for Indian languages in various applications.
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Scribus gets hyphenation support for 11 Indian languages
Posted on March 2, 2019
| Santhosh Thottingal
Support for hyphenating in 11 Indian languages is now available in Scribus, desktop publishing system. Two years back I had written how Malayalam hyphenation support was added to Scribus. Later, I had filed a bug to add support for more Indian languages. That is now fixed.
Scribus has a new way to download and use these hyphenation dictionaries. You can now use this feature right away in your installed scribus. The languages with hyphenation support are the following:
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Indesign CC automatic hyphenation for Indian languages
Posted on October 29, 2017
| Santhosh Thottingal
More and more publishers are starting to use Indesign CC and Unicode. One of the many adavantages the publishers get with unicode and Indesign cc is automatic hyphenation. A few of my friends told me that they don’t know how to use hyphenation. Eventhough I never used Indesign before, I decided to figure out. In my Windows 10 virtual machine, I installed Indesign CC 2018.
Following is a tutorial on how to get perfect hyphenation for text in Indian languages in Indesign.
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Scribus gets Malayalam Hyphenation support
Posted on October 29, 2017
| Santhosh Thottingal
Scribus now has support for Malayalam hyphenation.
I filed a bug report to add Malayalam hyphenation rules to Scribus and it is now added to scribus. The hyphenation rules are based on the TeX hyphenation patterns I wrote.
How to use You need scribus 1.5.4 or later. It is not yet available as release while I am writing this. But once released you can get from https://www.scribus.net/downloads/
Start a new document.
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Libreoffice Malayalam Hyphenation
Posted on April 5, 2017
| Santhosh Thottingal
I had developed and released hyphenation extension for Malayalam in Openoffice years back. Libreoffice was born later. Eventhough libreoffice supported the openoffice extensions, the extension repository is freshly created for libreoffice. The old extensions were not present in the libreoffice repository.
Now, I have uploaded the Malayalam hyphenation extension in libreoffice extension repository too. I will explain the installation and configuration step by step in this blog post:
All Operating systems Download an extension and save it anywhere on your computer.
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Indic hyphenation patterns relicensed
Posted on January 16, 2016
| Santhosh Thottingal
The hyphenation rules for Indian languages I maintain now relicensed to much permissive MIT license. This was a blocker for to get added to Android, and Firefox.
Hyphenation in web
Posted on March 17, 2013
| Santhosh Thottingal
This is a follow up of a 4 year old blog post about hyphenation. Hyphenation allows the controlled splitting of words to improve the layout of paragraphs, typically splitting words at syllabic or morphemic boundaries and visually indicating the split (usually with a hyphen).
I wrote about how a webpage can use Hyphenator javascript library to achieve hyphenation for a text with ‘justify‘ style. Along with the hyphenation rules I wrote for many Indian languages, this solution works and some websites already use it.
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Inkscape hyphenation extension
Posted on October 3, 2009
| Santhosh Thottingal
One year back I wrote about how to use Inkscape as a workaround solution for DTP in indic scripts. Still we don’t have any DTP software which supports Indic scripts in Unicode. Scribus still does not have the Indic support. One issue with inkscape when used as DTP for indic script was, a few indic scripts always wanted hyphenation when text is justified. For example Malayalam has lengthy words and often space is wasted in lines if the text is not automatically hyphenated.
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New Hyphenation Pattern Extensions for Openoffice
Posted on August 15, 2009
| Santhosh Thottingal
Openoffice Indic Natural Language group announces the availability of the following Openoffice hyphenation dictionary extensions.
Malayalam Hyphenation Rules version 1.2 Kannada Hyphenation Rules version 1.1 Bengali Hyphenation Rules verson 1.1 Hindi Hyphenation Rules version 1.1 Telugu Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Tamil Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Gujarati Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Panjabi Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Oriya Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Marathi Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Spellchecker extension for Malayalam is also ready.
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Hyphenation of Indian Languages in Webpages
Posted on December 17, 2008
| Santhosh Thottingal
In my last blogpost I explained hyphenation of Indian language text in openoffice. In this blogpost I will explain how hyphenation can be done in webpages.
As I explained importance of hyphenation come into picture when we justify the text. The length of the lines are controlled by the parent tags…. Unicode had defined a special character called soft hyphen for hyphenation denoted by . In HTML, the plain hyphen is represented by the “-” character (- or-).
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