Add a "Force CSS Hyphenation" feature

[Marco Lusini]

The current "Hyphenate file" feature of the extended driver doesn't work on the Kobo, since the firmware seems to mess up the display when it finds soft-hyphens in the epub code.

As an alternative, you coud add a single line to the epub CSS (or may be add a brand new, possibly customizable, CSS file...) in order to enable the native hyphenation feature of the ACCESS rendering engine:

* { -webkit-hyphens: auto; }

with this line, every paragraph with a justified text alignment will be hyphenated by the ACCESS engine.
The language used for hyphenation is the one specified in the <dc:language> element of the content.opf. (I think that this can be locally overriden with the 'lang' attribute).
This line is present in libnickel.so, and I guess that it is used when the user selects "justified" in font options dialog.

This feature could replace the current "Hyphenate file" feature or be added as an extra option.

[Joel Goguen (jgoguen)]

Given that the current hyphenation is just broken, through no fault of the hyphenation library in use, I would be inclined to replace the current hyphenation code with this. The hyphenation may not be as good, but at least the book is displayed properly.

[Marco Lusini (marco-lusini)]

WRT to the quality of the hyphenation, I was able to considerably imrove it by replacing the 'hyphen_it.dic' file (for Italian) in '/usr/local/Kobo/hyphenDicts' with the italian hyphenation file from OpenOffice.

[Marco Lusini (marco-lusini)]

In the mean time I found a way to load a custom CSS with every book, so this could be not necessary anymore...
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=218814

[Joel Goguen (jgoguen)]

It doesn't change that I want to keep this option, but it may change how I'm planning to do it. Davidfor is also working on some CSS modifications, I've sent him a note with what you found, but I'm going to go with whatever method he uses for consistency.