From my experience long ago with typesetting, hyphenation is the preferred
method of handling awkward line breaks. This gives a much better overall
appearance to the text and is very easy to read.
This assumes of course that your software hyphenates at the correct
locations in the word, generally on syllable boundaries. Incorrect
hyphenation will reduce readability significantly.
Eric Hildum
> Kyle Barrow wrote:
>
>> Wrapping mid-word is a problem inherent with a system built
>> for Japanese
>> characters but can easily be avoided with a little bit of
>> server-side magic.
>
> I don't necessarily agree that wrapping mid-word is a problem that needs to
> be fixed. Within a day or so of use, most people I have talked to agree that
> reading English i-mode content wrapped mid-word is easier than reading text
> that has been formatted with fixed line breaks. Forcing line breaks often
> results in only 2 or 3 words per line, and long passages of text are hard to
> read and take up a huge amount of vertical space. Moreover, with the lack of
> bold or size formatting for text, every line seems to be a headline.
>
> People evidently do a good job of putting together the fragments of words
> together from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. This is
> probably very similar to readability using hyphenation. Look at the
> newspaper or magazine on your desk; most people don't notice hyphenation, it
> doesn't interfere with readability, and is a good use of space.
>
> I'd like to do some formal research on this; anyone with more information or
> a different opinion, please let me know.
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Received on Fri Dec 8 20:07:05 2000