I am using Scrivener for writing Swedish. When I compile for .epub there are lots of incorrect word divisions - naturally, I realise, since rules for hyphenating are highly language specific.
I have been asking around in iBooks forums but it seems hard to get a solution from the reader side. Except there is a language setting, which may or may not regulate the optional hyphenating. I don’t know.
What language specific rules are there in Scrivener? What rules for word divisions and hyphenating are relevant in Scrivener? Are there any possibilities to adapt them?
You are right to investigate this from the reader side. Scrivener’s ePub files don’t do anything with regards to hyphenation, leaving the implementation, rules and tweaking down to the reader software. You should find it varies from one to the next, Kobo, Nook, etc.
Do you have an example of an ePub in Swedish with what you would consider to be good hyphenation; one that isn’t locked down with DRM that you can examine? If so I’d take a look at the HTML files and CSS between that and Scrivener’s, and see if there are any differences you can apply to your ePub to improve how the reader hyphenates the text.
As for our files, we don’t declare a language in the HTML meta-data. All we do is declare the UTF–8 character set.
Calibre is by the way a good tool for this kind of stuff.
Thank you for your reply!
I am not sure I can find an epub file in Swedish, well hyphenated and not drm protected.
But I am really confused over how hyphenation is performed in iBooks, really.
I have an example file from Scrivener which in iBooks obviously does not follow the Swedish basic rule dividing the word ‘vattnet’ as ‘vatt-net’, but as ‘vat-tnet’. Other examples: ‘behan-dling’, ‘förän-dring…’, ‘frus-trerad’ …
At the same time iBooks has examples of correct hyphenations with the same basic rule - keep one and only one consonant letter before a vowel in a word. Which maybe is not so strange, it should be the basic rule in many languages, unless the word consists of two separate words combined to one. But also a Swedish word like ‘bildskärm’, which is a word composed of the two words ‘bild’ and ‘skärm’, is correctly hyphenated ‘bild-skärm’, not according to the basic rule. Which implies knowledge of Swedish!?
I realise that this does not indicate anything at all - it may be the same deviation from the basic rule, just correct by chance this time.
But I am confused. Somewhere there should be some rules, these should be adaptable …!?
Since hyphenation is done entirely in the reader software at the time of rendering the book, it’s not something you’ll be able to control from the Scrivener side. There are CSS codes to disable hyphenation (which may not work), but as far as I have seen, not much to really control how it works.
A great forum for general ebook design discussion is MobileRead. They also have a wiki with tons of information on how to work with ebook technology. If there is a way to control how iBooks works, or set the language model and dictionary for hyphenation, you’ll most likely find it there.
Thank you, AmberV!
I will go there!