G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > > […] > > Permit me to unpack the foregoing. > >> There is no place for hyphenation in a technical document. > > I wonder how many technical documents you consulted before venturing > this proclamation. Here are some technical documents that employ > hyphenation. I trust that you don't find them obscure. […]
Wow. Over a technical writing career stretching from 1982 to 2025, I only turned off hyphenation when I had to use Microslop Weird. I quickly got tired of having to fix yet another instance of four hyphenated lines in a row and all the completely weird breaks. I seem to remember FrameMaker having some hyphenation glitches, probably in the version 6.x era; but when I ditched it for groff[1], I set `.hy 14` and only rarely had to make corrections. To be honest, I find Ingo’s “don’t hyphenate manpages” to be, in his own words, overly broad. As mentioned upthread, it’s not hard to turn hyphenation on/off at the command line for both -mdoc and -man. Everybody wins. >> Unfortunately groff insists on hyphenating words that are known to be >> technical terms > > Known to whom? And when in the last 40-something years was it decreed that technical terms not be hyphenated? I didn’t get that memo (<1992) or email (after). If you’re writing long-form[2] (i.e. not -man or -mdoc) documents in groff, it’s not difficult to set up a hyphenation library and have all your documents call it (since most people extend -ms to produce PDFs with groff, you can include your hyphenation preferences automatically or turn it off completely if that’s your preference). Each house has its own house style, and it’s not cool to make it difficult for ten houses because one house insists on doing things different. — Larry [1] TBH, that was in response to Adoobie deciding it was “too difficult” to port Frame to OSX; but moving to groff reduced formatting times from about four hours to 3 minutes (two passes on a blue Mac G3). No longer did I have to decide whether that formatting glitch was worth another half day to fix. [2] I’ve heard some people argue that -ms is really meant for mid-length documents, and -mm is the true long-form macro package. But just about everyone extends -ms to suit their local needs, and I regularly produced a 1000-page document using my own -ms extensions until customers asked me to break it into four separate documents.
