[scribus] Poor hyphenation in french language

[Gregory Pittman]

On 07/04/2012 08:44 AM, Christian Schilmöller wrote:
> Hello list!
> 
> I'am typesetting a book in french with scribus.
> Unfortunately, the automated hyphenation causes a lot of work
> and leads to a lot of complains from the original author.
> 
> In the hyphenation menu in the document settings, the
> language is set correctly set to french. 
> However, the hyphenation algorithm does not meet the
> special requirements of the french:
> 
> Some examples:
> Some short words like avant, comme, guerre, cannot by hyphenated
> at all. Words like nation, situation, libération (ending -tion)
> are hyphenated before the last two characters (-ti-on), which is
> wrong. Many verbs in the third person plural end like -ient, -aient
> etc but a hyphen is wrongly placed into that last syllable.
> 
> I've finished the book by inserting many soft-hyphens with ctrl-
> shift-"-" and also filling the exceptions list. But this solution
> is very fragile. If any small change should be made in the text
> or the layout, many hyphens and line endings have to be checked
> again.
> 
> Is there any way of creating a "test setup" which demonstrates
> my problem more clearly?
> 
> I'm used to text processors which work more reliably (e. g.
> OpenOffice or Tex/LaTex) concerning hyphenation.
> 
> I looked into the files belonging to scribus, but I cannot
> figure out that something is missing there.
> There is a file named "hyph_fr.dic" which seems to be 
> responsible for hyphenation. The file is readable and has
> a content which seems reasonable.
> Is it possible that this file is not used as it should be?
> 
> Is this really a problem of scribus or am I doing something
> basically wrong?
> 
It would be nice to be able to import some rules, but afaik you have to
work on this yourself.

In File > Preferences > Hyphenation you can add rules of your own, and
can at least prevent hyphenating comme and avant.

All the same, it does seem like French hyphenation rules are not being
applied in your case.

It would also be worth checking the manual (will be in English even with
a French language setting) under Settings > Hyphenation, where some
explanation is present on hyphenation.

Greg