Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 08/28/05 14:03

"Safalra" <usenet@safalra.com> wrote:

>> Sensible wrapping would require recognizing the language and using
>> language-dependent hyphenation, to start with.
>
> What we need are freely-available hyphenation dictionaries

There are such dictionaries, though they are probably unreliable.
What's more important is that hyphenation dictionaries handle just a small
part of language-dependent hyphenation, though they might look like
complete solutions if you only think about the small minority of world's
language that has as little word declination as English and you don't care
about the hyphenation of uncommon words ("uncommon" defined by what is not
in some dictionary).

>> > It can hardly be his fault if someone has a very long given name...
>>
>> It is. It is his or her responsibility to check data that goes to the
>> page, and handle problems suitably.
>
> I'll concede that point as well. Could you suggest a good way to handle
> this?

It depends on the purpose of presenting the name and on the way of getting
it. All the approaches you mention, and a few others, _may_ be suitable,
but the choice needs to depend on the circumstances. As a rule, when
presenting a person's name, the constructive approach is to avoid doing
things that confuse the presentation when the name is long. For example,
don't set a column width but let a column of names in table take its
natural width.

--
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