jekyll_hyphenate

See my blog post for a way to hyphenate text in Jekyll pages, and all other HTML documents.

##NB From the W3 standard:

Hyphenation occurs when the line breaks at a valid hyphenation opportunity, which is a type of soft wrap opportunity that exists within a word where hyphenation is allowed. In CSS hyphenation opportunities are controlled with the hyphens property. CSS Text Level 3 does not define the exact rules for hyphenation; however UAs are strongly encouraged to optimize their choice of break points and to chose language-appropriate hyphenation points.

hyphens Value: none | manual | auto Initial: manual

... so just set hyphens: auto in the CSS for body, like this:

  body {
    hyphens: auto;
  }

However:

Correct automatic hyphenation requires a hyphenation resource appropriate to the language of the text being broken. The UA must therefore only automatically hyphenate text for which the content language is known and for which it has an appropriate hyphenation resource.

Authors should correctly tag their content’s language (e.g. using the HTML lang attribute or XML xml:lang attribute) in order to obtain correct automatic hyphenation.

WORK STOPPED AFTER I FOUND THE ABOVE

Jekyll Liquid filter to apply Text::Hyphen to content contained within HTML tags that containing text. The tags to examine can be configured; the default tags to process are a, li, and p.

Installation

Add this line to your Jekyll project's Gemfile, within the jekyll_plugins group:

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'jekyll_hyphenate'
end

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Use

To hyphenate content, use the filter like this:

{{ content | hyphenate }}

Configuration

There are a few configurable parameters which control hyphenation behavior. These parameters are language, left, right and tags. These take the same values as Text::Hyphen. In brief:

• language - language of the content. Defaults to en_us.
• left - minimum number of characters to the left of the hyphen. Defaults to 2.
• right - minimum number of characters to the right of the hyphen. Defaults to 2.
• tags - HTML tags to process. Defaults are a, p, and li.

In addition, you can specify the string used to indicate hyphenation points with the hyphen parameter. The default is the UTF-8 soft-hyphen character (Unicode code U+00AD). Note that this is the UTF-8 character, not an entity.

You can update _config.yml to set these parameters. For example:

hyphenate_filter:
  language: en_uk
  left: 4
  right: 3
  hyphen: "­"
  tags: a,li,p

This configuration sets the language to UK English, with a minimum of 4 characters to the left of the hyphenation, minimum 3 characters to the right, and the HTML entity ­ to indicate hyphenation points.

Demo

See demo/index.html for examples.

Run the demo website by typing:

$ demo/_bin/debug -r

... and point your web browser to http://localhost:4444

Additional Information

More information is available on Mike Slinn’s website.

New Implementation

This plugin is meant as a replacement for the abandoned grzm/jekyll_hyphenate Jekyll filter. It directly calls the rubygems.org/gems/text-hyphen Ruby gem.

This will be a new implementation, not based on Jekyll::HyphenateFilter from Jekyll plugins by Aucor, but (mostly?) upward compatible with grzm/jekyll_hyphenate.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies.

You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To build and install this gem onto your local machine, run:

$ bundle exec rake install
jekyll_hyphenate 0.1.0 built to pkg/jekyll_hyphenate-0.1.0.gem.
jekyll_hyphenate (0.1.0) installed.

Examine the newly built gem:

$ gem info jekyll_hyphenate

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

jekyll_hyphenate (0.1.0)
    Author: Mike Slinn
    Homepage: https://github.com/mslinn/jekyll_hyphenate
    License: MIT
    Installed at: /home/mslinn/.gems

    Jekyll filter plugin for hyphenation.

Copyright

• Copyright 2023 Michael Slinn.
• Released under the MIT License (see LICENSE for details).