Hyphenation with a rare language

[mattinaakka]

Hello! My situation is this:

I'm making a small book that has text in English and in Sámi language, both texts will have hyphenation. English of course is fine but Sámi instead can be a little tricky since I don't speak it, but my client does. I've given the client a sample how automatic hyphenations would look like and there are some words that are hyphenated incorrectly.

My concern is that if I manually fix the errors, some other word will get hyphenated creating another error, and the bouncing the preview files between me and client will prolong the project too much...

So finally the question: If I know the inocrrectly hyphenated words, what would be the "pro workflow" to fix them? I just learned about 'Discretionary line breaks', should I insert one in the correct place and just type "-"? Also I guess I can make this easier to adjust Hyphenation settings to only affect long >8 letter words etc...

edit: After further examination I think inserting a 'Discretionary hyphen' is the way to go, but feel free to provide insight 🙂

Thanks!

[Joel Cherney]

It's been a while since I did so, but the last time I needed hyphenation in an unsupported language it was possible to add hunspell dictionaries to InDesign - and there are Saami hunspell dictionaries posted right over here. That'd be pretty pro, I think. But I'm a rare-languages pro, so I might not employ the perfectly pro solution of turning off hyphenation, even through it'd be much faster than installing custom dictionaries.

[Jongware]

Here is another article on adding a Hunspell dictionary, with some more user friendly guidance.

As a fellow rare-languages-pro, I might try if faking it is good enough. Sure, English hyphenation breaks are totally wrong, but that's to be expected because English is very rare, a complete mix-up of Germanic and Romance rules. Sámi, on the other hand, should be closely related to one of Swedish, Norwegian, or (an outlier guess) Finnish.

Apply these languages to the words your client marked as "wrong" and see if they get hyphenated correctly. If it does, mark all of your text with that particular language. Some hyphens may still be wrong but that is to be expected! There are always expections to the built-in rules; for instance, InDesign has a problem hyphenating the perfectly cromulent English word "timescale".

[Joel Cherney]

Ooh, that's a good one! Finnish would actually be the first one to try, as it's also from the Uralic language group. 

[mattinaakka]

Thanks a lot both of you! I will check into Hunspell.

I have indeed set the Sámi paragraphs as Finnish before writing this post, being Finnish myself I thought that setting would get me close enough 🙂 If for some reason I won't go with the Hunspell-solution, am I correct that Discretionary hyphens are The tool to correct any mistakes?

[Joel Cherney]

I dunno if they're The tool. They're certainly A Fine Tool. Everyone has their own preferred method of  getting a pleasing rag, and there are other tools in one's toolbox, outside of the Discretionary Hyphen. (Non-breaking spaces, the No Break attribute, and the infamous "soft return" spring immediately to mind.) But yeah, they're quite useful in those places where you have strong feelings about hyphenation that InDesign's hyphenation engine doesn't share