Hyphenation errors

Automatic hyphenation can not be error-free! Because …

… homographs may be hyphenated differently.
```
  desert (arid land) -> des‧ert
  desert (to leave) -> de‧sert
```
In some patterns, this is solved by not hyphenating ambiguous words at all.

… neologisms that are not in the list of words used for pattern creation may be hyphenated incorrectly.

  blogosphere -> blog·o·sphere (Merriam webster)
      // bl‧o‧gos‧phere (en-us patterns)
      // blo‧go‧sphere (en-gb patterns)

… the rules for hyphenation may have changed or are not specified unambiguously.

  dictionary -> dic‧tion‧ary (Wiktionary)
      // dic·tio·nary (Merriam-Webster)

… the patterns differ in quality. Some are very new and reflect the current state of the language, others are older. Some are based on a very large list of words, others are crafted by hand (which is not necessarily bad).
… patterns are made for a specific set of characters (the alphabet of the respective language). So e.g. en-us patterns will not be able to correctly hyphenate a word that contains a character outside of the range [a-z] (Hyphenopoly doesn’t even try to hyphenate in this case, but rather leaves the word unchanged).

In any case, automatic hyphenation needs proofreading and may need some intervention.

Proofread

Use a visible hyphen character to display all hyphen opportunities:

Hyphenopoly.config({
    require: [...],
    setup: {
        selectors: {
            ".hyphenate": {
                hyphen: "•"
            }
        }
    }
});

Fix hyphenation

There are three levels of fixing possibilities:

Directly in the text
Defining hyphenation exceptions for Hyphenopoly
Improve patterns

Fix hyphenation in the text

Words containing a soft hyphen () will not be hyphenated by Hyphenopoly.js. Therefore, you can simply add soft hyphens manually to ‘overwrite’ automatic hyphenation.

pro:

easy to do

contra:

needs to be repeated for every occurrence of the word
has no effect in the long term (others will not benefit)

Define hyphenation exceptions.

Hyphenopoly.js has an API for hyphenation exceptions:

Hyphenopoly.config({
    require: {...},
    setup: {
        exceptions: {
            "en-us": "desert, dic-tion-ary, dic-tion-aries, blog-o-sphere" //language-specific exceptions
        },
        selectors: {...}
    }
});

In the example above, Hyphenopoly.js will never hyphenate the word “desert” and will hyphenate the words “dictionary”, “dictionaries” and “blogosphere” at the positions marked with a hyphen-minus. Exceptions are case-sensitive. The example above will not work for capitalized words (e.g. “Desert”).

pro:

one place for all exceptions
exceptions apply to all occurrences of the words

contra:

needs carefulness
has no effect in the long term (others will not benefit)

Help to improve the patterns

Go to http://www.hyphenation.org/ and help to improve the patterns.

pro:

others will benefit (Mozilla, Apple, the whole TeX-community and many others rely on these patterns)
the error will be fixed in long term (sometimes, maybe)

contra:

fixing patterns often takes a long time (not all patterns are actively maintained)
fixing the patterns often requires extended knowledge

As an intermediate step to improved patterns, Hyphenopoly has the ability to include exceptions in the wasm-file. Feel free to open an issue if you have a good list of exceptions for a language.