[Typo3-dev] Hyphenation Extension

[Hannes Schmidt]

Hi,

I am thinking about creating a Typo3 extension that automatically hyphenates
(word-breaks) textual content objects using ­ entities. I found the very
neat TeX::Hyphen Perl module, which uses TeX-style hyphenation dictionaries
for the various languages and is capable of normal as well as German and
Czech hyphenation rules. The downside is that it is sort of slow.

Another difficulty is that the various browsers handle the soft hyphen ­
in different ways. IE on Windows implements the soft-hyphen correctly. Most
other browsers Mozilla, Eudora, Netscape ignore it for word-breaking but do
not display it either, which is acceptable. IE on Mac and Safari on Mac
display it (IE shows it as a accented letter, Safari as a dash) and do not
use it for word-breaking. This is not acceptable.

Now, my idea is to create a backend extension providing an additional
transformation for the RTE. That would cure the performance problem, since
content is much less often edited by the backend than it is diplayed by the
frontend. On the frontend, there should be a user-agent-specific flter which
either transparently passes the ­ entities through or removes them.

Do you think this approach is sensible? If yes, two more questions arise:

1) Is there an easy way to install a content filter in the frontent?

2) Can RTE transformations be chained; that is, can more than one
transformation be active at the same time? If no, would it be difficult to
implement a RTE transformation chain?