tool for reviewing hyphenation

[Lars Huttar <lars_huttar@sil.org>]

Hello,

We have a situation where hyphenation is an issue, due to a 2-column
layout where the columns are not very wide. We've done a lot of tweaking
of settings for hyphenation and interword spacing, and the result seems
pretty good. In particular, there are not many cases of consecutive
lines that end with hyphens, and not many cases where a hyphenation
occurs over a right-hand page break. The few cases that exist, we have
been fixing manually by using \hbox{...} to prevent hyphenation at the
trouble spot.

But the hyphenation is by nature somewhat volatile, so whenever we
change something we would like to be able to easily recheck the hyphenation.
And our book is over 1200 pages, so it would be very helpful to have
tools to make the checking more efficient.

One tool we found was the "evince" PDF viewer in Linux, which highlights
all search results at once. So you can search for "-", and it will
highlight all hyphens, which makes it easier to scan the PDF visually
for hyphenation problems.
Still, this approach has its limitations... our layout domain experts
don't have Linux machines, and I haven't found a PDF viewer for Windows
that can highlight all search results at once.

Another approach we wondered about was having TeX highlight the
hyphenations... e.g. changed the background color to yellow or red, when
outputting a word that's dynamically broken/hyphenated. (Rather like we
have TeX output red grid lines to help with debugging layout.)
I think we would also want to highlight static hyphens that occur at the
end of a line, as in "Niger-
Congo," because they have a similar visual impact. Possibly using a
different color.

This would be an ideal solution, I think, but we don't know how to have
TeX detect when a word gets dynamically hyphenated.

Another possibility we've looked into is using javascript in Adobe
Reader to find and highlight end-of-line (and end-of-page) hyphens. But
this approach has proved more difficult than expected... the API and the
DOM are complex, and I haven't figured out yet how to access the text of
the document to search for hyphens. (The "search" method seems to just
go to the first or next occurence, and highlight only one occurrence at
a time.)

Thanks for any help,
Lars
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