Wrong Italian Hyphenation

[emarillo]

The InDesign Italian hypenation module (Hunspell dictionary)  hypens words like "atleta" and "atlantico" like:

at-le-ta

at-lant-ti-co

They should instead be hypenated like:

a-tle-ta

a-tlan-ti-co

[emarillo]

Sorry it was hypHenation, hypHens, hypHenated 🙂

And yes, my paragraph language is set to Italian.

[Joel Cherney]

When I want to hyphenate a word in a language for which I don't already have Hunspell dictionaries, I go to https://www.ushuaia.pl/hyphen/?ln=en and try my word there. When I plug in "atlantico" I get this:

That one almost matches your preferred hyphenation (although I have never encountered a typographic tradition that advises that you leave a single letter on the preceding line and wrap the other eight letters down). However, when I look at "atleta" I get similar results:

My first guesses are all things that you've already tried, and posted about it!  But "maybe emarillo doesn't actually have the dictionaries installed correctly" and "maybe emarillo doesn't actually have Italian language applied to their text" are the most likely circumstances. In third place I'd put "maybe emarillo installed a very old Hunspell package with lots of errors or incompatibilties". If it's not one of those, then maybe it's something wrong with your installation of InDesign that could be fixed. Would you be willing to post an InDesign file with some bad Italian hyphenation for me to test? If I install the most recent version of Italian Hunspell hyphenation dictionaries that I can find (4.0 is what I found after a cursory search) and get the same results as you, then maybe there is something wrong with the Hunspell package that can be fixed by going to the maintainers, or by fixing an InDesign bug, which we can report over at indesign.uservoice.com. Otherwise, if I install Hunspell and don't get the same results as you, then perhaps something is amiss in your install of InDesign? Something that could be fixed with a prefs reset or a reinstall? 

[emarillo]

Hi Joel, and thank you very much for your answer.

In a few words:

- In Italian, there are several words that can be hyphenated leaving the first letter alone. Another one of them is “astuccio"

- You'd better like to try an Italian hyphenation service, like www.silabas.net -> here “atleta” and “atlantico” are hyphenated in the right way (“a-…")

- Anyway, the problem appears also with the word “transatlantico” (= passenger liner) -> InDesign hyphens it as “tran-sat-lan-ti-co” (incorrect, it should be tran-sa-tlan-ti-co)

- I've encountered this issue both on my work and home Macs. I'm running Big Sur and Adobe InDesign CC2020, with a legitimate subcription. Everything (OS and apps) is up to date. I asked a frind of mine to make a test on an older Mac with InDesign CC2017, he too gets the issue. I'm not using the latest OS's and Adobe apps' versions because I'm in a production environment - better stay one step behind -, anyway the issue appears also in my InDesign CC2021 CC installation.

- I do confirm that I have the Italian language applied to my text. 

Would you like me to post some screenshots, or do you prefer to trigger this behaviour by yourself?

Regards,

Emanuele

[Eugene Tyson]

I can't get it to work like you want either.

Hmmm. I wonder if this would help you 

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/kb/add_cs_dictionaries.html

[emarillo]

Thank you Eugene. For now, I've added a certain amount of hyphenation exceptions to my dictionary in order to bypass the issue. 

I could post here my .txt exception list, if needed.

[Peter Kahrel]

Over here I too get the hyphenations at-le-ta and at-lan-ti-co. Like Joel, I'm surprised that Italian would accept word divisions after the first letter. Even when you allow InDesign to break words after the first letter (as set in the Hyphenation window),  it doesn't happen. (This is interesting in that when you allow after-first-letter hyphenation in the Hyphenation window, InDesign apparently uses in internal general rule not to break words after a first letter.)

[emarillo]

Hi Karel (my goodness, your scripts! A few days ago I paid you a small tribute for one of them). 

As I replied to Joel, it would be better for a non-Italian user to try an Italian hyphenation service. 
Please have a look also at https://sapere.virgilio.it/parole/vocabolario/atleta -> this is an Italian dictionary, you can see the word's hyphenation (a-tle-ta) under “Sillabazione”. 
As I also pointed out with Joel, the issue appears on transatlantico, too: InDesign hyphens it as tran-sat-lan-ti-co (it should instead be tran-sa-tlan-ti-co).

Bests,
Emanuele

[Peter Kahrel]

Indeed, and thank you for that donation!

Joel's (and my) point was that the hyphenations you see are correct from InDesign's point of view, so there's nothing wrong with your installation. InDesign gets it wrong. You can log a bug (or add your voice to any of the existing bug reports that undoubtedly already exist).

Maybe an third-party dictionary does a better job. Did you try Eugene's suggestion?

P.

[emarillo]

Eugene's suggestion could worth a try, but I preferred do add a series of hyphenation exceptions to my current dictionary, since I already have hundreds of them.

I work with Italian books and mags that contain LOTS of English words -> applying the English language to each one of them would be a nightmare, In the course of time I preferred to add them as hyphenation exceptios in the Hunspell Italian dictionary.

Switching to another dictionary would force me to re-add those exceptions, I'm afraid. 
It would instead be great if Adobe could solve this issue, also for the other Italian users. 

I'm going to report the bug 🙂 

[Joel Cherney]

Well, it's not that hard to export your exceptions list, and then re-import it once you've switched dictionaries. You certainly don't have to add them manually!

[emarillo]

You're right Joel, I'll give it a try. But in the past, when I tried to export and re-import the .txt dicionaries lists, I had to fine-tune them since they lost the Uppercase/lowercase distinction. 

Another aspect is that, if I had to pass along my layout designs to my clients, their Hunspell dictionaries will re-introduce the wrong hyphenations (and the text could reflow). 
The better solution would be for Adobe/Hunspell to fix the issue. 

[Joel Cherney]

, I had to fine-tune them since they lost the Uppercase/lowercase distinction. 

Another aspect is that, if I had to pass along my layout designs to my clients, their Hunspell dictionaries will re-introduce the wrong hyphenations (and the text could reflow). 

This is not something I do very often (most of the languages I work in don't use hyphenation at all!) but both of these sound like they could be worked around. The reason that I continue to suggest workarounds is that I have no idea, really, how the Hunspell dictionaries in InDesign are maintained, and I haven't been able to figure it out with my cursory searches. It's not like Hunspell is a company to fix bugs; it's a community-driven project, and so that makes me wonder if Adobe has a Hunspell maintainer to implement these fixes, or if Adobe gets its Hunspell dictionaries from Github or the LibreOffice project like the rest of us. 🙂  

Anyhow, if you wanted to make a bug report, the place where the InDesign devs will actually see it would be at indesign.uservoice.com. 

I think that if you package your InDesign files to deliver to your clients, you can check the "Use document hyphenation exceptions only" checkbox at packaging, which should ostensibly prevent that reflow you're concerned about. And, lastly, I have no idea how hyphenation exceptions word lists work, but if they're losing case information at export or reimport, that this in itself might be worth a bug report! I'll take a look at it the next time I have an InDesign project in a writing system that actually uses hyphenation. 

[emarillo]

Hi Joel, thank you, you've been very kind. 

I never noticed the "Use document hyphenation exceptions only" checkbox in the package options, this is indeed a great workaround! I never had the need of a similar option before today, since the client of mine who have the Italian document full of English terms doesn't ask me for the open files, just the PDFs... While my “athletic-atlantic" client does ask me for the InDesign files along with the hi-res PDFs. I'll check that box from the next consignment to him.

I've also reported the bug to indesign.uservoice.com. 

Have a nice day, 
Emanuele