I am finding that hyphenation works poorly in Swedish when exporting on a Mac to a justified format.
I am using os x with a Swedish keyboard, but with English as the system language.
Is there a way to insert tentative hyphenation points in words, or adding them to a dictionary somewhere, to get some of the most glaring mishaps out of the way?
(I believe, but have not tested to any degree of certainty that hyphenation works better in Pages. But it should be the same, as it is not part of either application, right?)
Best regards,
peter
Hi Peter.
Unfortunately the hyphenation is all handled by Apple’s text system code, so I don’t believe there is a way of changing it. Does it improve at all if you set the language in Scrivener to Swedish via the General pane of the Preferences (and restart the app)? This puts the whole app into Swedish, so I’m wondering if this might be a cue to the text system’s hyphenation system. Another thing to try is ensuring that the spell-checker defaults to Swedish, as that might also affect the text system’s choices.
Apple actually uses a different text system for Pages which they built specifically for that app rather than the text system they built for third-party developers to use, so Pages may well be a little different. (TextEdit does use the Apple text system, though, so that is a better comparison in that sense.)
If you are trying to generate a PDF or printout, a workaround might be to export to .docx and then open that in Pages and print or create the PDF from there if switching to the Swedish spelling dictionary or language doesn’t help. (Unfortunately I have no access to the hyphenation part of the text system code.)
All the best,
Keith
Keith,
Many thanks for a well thought out reply.
I think you are on the dot.
I rejected using Swedish for Scrivener, as I hate having commands translated into Swedish. The translations are not that good, and as far as I am concerned, the lingo for computer operations has always been English.
My guess is that when you specify Swedish, Scrivener will also request hyphenation in Swedish from os x.
Bingo, that is probably it.
I will change to Swedish when I compile, and else run a fabulous app in English!
Good thinking. Why did I not think of that?
Thanks, peter
Great, I’m glad that helped! We do want to improve the translations as time goes on. We had a lot of input from Swedish users during the beta testing to get the translations right, but there was so much feedback and so many translations that there is still more to do…
All the best,
Keith