Conditional hyphen
A conditional hyphen (also conditional separator , soft separator or soft hyphen based on the English term soft hyphen , abbreviated shy ) is used to specify a hyphen within a word at which a line break is permitted . If the word is broken, a hyphen appears at the end of the line . If the word is not broken, the conditional hyphen remains invisible in the printed document or in the web browser .
With some software, finding conditional hyphenated words causes problems.
Browser support
It is interpreted correctly in the current versions of practically all common browsers and therefore reaches the majority of users: in Mozilla Firefox from version 3, in Internet Explorer from version 5, in Apple Safari from version 2, in Opera from version 7.1 and in Konqueror from Version 3.5. However, if a web browser ignores this information and separates it as if no character had been specified, the use does not represent a disadvantage for the user compared to omitting it. However, the use is problematic in browsers that always display a separator instead, such as Safari to Version 1.2. Here the symbol even represents a disadvantage.
The word below contains several ­codes. It can therefore be used to test the web browser. It will be interpreted correctly if a separator is only displayed at the position of the line break, but not otherwise:
- Danube steam shipping company captains hats interior lining manufacturer company works council meeting room wallpaper supplier entrance door lock keyhole expert pants hole tamping machine spare parts manufacturing process variant problem psychologist son
In Unicode , the conditional hyphen has the property Default_Ignorable_Code_Point ; H. The character must not be taken into account in search and sort operations. Nevertheless, the on-site search functions of some web browsers , for example Internet Explorer 8.0 and Opera 11.01, do not see over the character, so that such separated words cannot be found. This also applies to some web server search engines. The Chrome and Firefox web browsers can handle the conditional hyphen.
Support in e-book readers
Although e-book reader devices actually aim to achieve a possible appearance of the printed book similar view for displaying is justified significant support conditional hyphen at the popular e-book devices and programs often poorly:
- Amazon Kindle : Not fully supported. Kindle 3 always displays the character as a hyphen. After a more recent automatic firmware upgrade, it also supports the KF8 format and displays the conditional hyphen completely correctly. In the PC application (“Kindle for PC”) the character is interpreted correctly. Amazon's new Kindle 8 format fully supports the conditional hyphen.
- Apple iBooks : The character is supported. In extreme cases, however, inaccuracies in the margin adjustment occur.
- Sony PRS-600 : The character is displayed as an unknown character.
- Caliber : When converting documents with a conditional hyphen to EPUB and MOBI format (corresponds to the AZW format for Kindle), the characters are removed by Caliber.
- Adobe Digital Editions : The character is taken into account, i. H. used for the break. However, no hyphen is displayed.
Representation on computer systems
The keyboard symbol for the conditional hyphen has only been standardized since 2012 in Amendment 1 (2012) to ISO / IEC 9995 -7: 2009 "Information technology - Keyboard layouts for text and office systems - Symbols used to represent functions" as symbol 76, as well as in IEC 60417 “Graphical Symbols for use on Equipment” as the symbol IEC 60417-6073 “Hyphen, soft” .
Typical word processing software have not adjusted the appearance and labeling. In WordPerfect conditional hyphen is in the control character window as a system hyphen called. In OpenOffice.org variants and Microsoft Word , it is highlighted in gray in the source text or shown as “¬”.
| Standard / System | Conditional hyphen | |
|---|---|---|
| Character encoding | ||
| Unicode | Codepoint | U + 00AD |
| Surname | SOFT HYPHENS | |
| UTF-8 | C2 AD | |
| ISO 8859-1 | AD hex | |
| HTML entity |
­
|
|
| XML / XHTML | decimal |
­
|
| hexadecimal |
­
|
|
| TeX / LaTeX | Text mode |
\-
|
| Mathem. mode | - | |
| Input methods 1 | ||
| German standard keyboard layouts |
E1 | Alt Gr+- |
| T2 | Alt Gr+- | |
| Windows | CP850 ( TUI ) | Alt+ 2402 |
| CP1252 ( GUI ) | Alt+ 01732 | |
| macintosh | No defined key. Can be inserted via the character overview by searching for the Unicode control characters SOFT HYPHEN. | |
| Linux (with newer versions of X11 ) | Compose, -, -,Leertaste | |
| AmigaOS | Alt+N | |
| Neo |
Mod3+ ↹, -, -, Leertaste4 or Mod3+ Mod4+ Taste-rechts-neben-der-Null5 |
|
| Apache OpenOffice variants | Strg+- | |
| LibreOffice | Strg+- | |
| Microsoft Word | Keyboard shortcut | Strg+- |
| Unicode input | A, D, Alt+C | |
| Microsoft Powerpoint | Alt+ 01732 | |
| WordPerfect | Strg+ ⇧Shift+- | |
| Vim | Digraph 3 | Strg+ K, -,- |
| Unicode input | Strg+ V, U, 0, 0, A,D | |
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ as consistently referred to in DIN 5008 : 2020-03 writing and design rules for text and information processing
- ↑ CSS improvements in Firefox 3
- ^ The Unicode Consortium (ed.): The Unicode Standard, Version 6.1.0 . Mountain View 2012, ISBN 978-1-936213-02-3 , Chapter 5. Implementation Guidelines: 5.21 Ignoring Characters in Processing, p. 184 .
- ↑ Parlament.gv.at 729th meeting of the Federal Council on December 21, 2005 - “Sandmännchen” can only be found as a PDF.
- ↑ amazon.com
- ↑ a b c Hyphenation in ePub Continued ( Memento from October 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Caliber 2 version 0.8.23