Hyphenation errors with Word 2007

[Pam]

I have found that the dictionary in general in Word 2007 allows/suggests
hyphenation in the wrong places. Word 2003 had this issue with a few words
but now it is a major issue. As a publisher, this is a serious problem. Has
anyone found a work-around? Is Microsoft addressing this?
Thanks

 

[Robert M. Franz [RMF]]

Hello Pam

I have found that the dictionary in general in Word 2007 allows/suggests
hyphenation in the wrong places. Word 2003 had this issue with a few words
but now it is a major issue. As a publisher, this is a serious problem. Has
anyone found a work-around? Is Microsoft addressing this?

I'm not sure they're aware. The natruallanguage-blog lists only one post
dealing with hyphenation, and that's about a hotfix for German hyphenation:
http://blogs.msdn.com/naturallanguage/archive/tags/hyphenator/default.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/naturallanguage/archive/2009/01/22/hotfix-f-r-die-deutsche-silbentrennung.aspx

The blog post is still open for comments -- you could try it there, I
suppose.

FWIW, I've published a good deal of long Word documents over the years
(in German and English), and I never relied on automatic hyphenation;
mostly not due to lack of trust in the correct hyphenation of a word,
but because Word's approach was not flexible enough/didn't produce the
output we were aiming at (a lot more important in German with its many
really long words, of course).

HTH
Robert

 

[Stefanie Schiller [MSFT]]

Hello Pam,

thanks so much for your input. We really do appreciate this kind of feedback.

We are aware that our hyphenators don't rock - thanks to user feedback just
like yours. And while we are convinced that we have made substantial
improvements at least for German users with the latest hotfix release (which
is also included in Office Serive Pack 2) we fully understand that further
improvements will be needed to satisfy user needs.

With regards to US English hyphenation in particular, this has the addional
challenge that there is no standardized rule system in place that determines
where hyphenation points need to occur and where not. Instead, US English has
several competing rule systems (American Heritage, Strunk & White and
others). This, of course, contributes to confusion as sometimes our
hyphenator (which uses the American Heritage rule system) might not be wrong
after all, but simply uses a different rule system than the user might
expect. This, of course, is not meant to be an excuse for the fact that our
US hyphenator provides more often wrong hyphenation points than it should,
even according to American Heritage rules.

Given all of this, we are working on a new version of the hyphenators for a
number of languages, including English and German. We are doing our best to
make sure that all the user issues and concerns we are hearing about will get
addressed in the new versions. So, without making promises, if you have any
set of particular words that you would like to see fixed we would be very
much interested in getting these. Any one word can point us to a pattern
issue that by getting it fixed would help us make significant improvements.

We think of linguistic development as a never ending process. Each ship
cycle we have only limited time and resources to get things done - and there
is a very long list of features that needs our attention. Thus, our
hyphenators will never be perfect. However, we do want them to be of a
quality so that our users have confidence in using them. Shipping a feature
that users disregard because they deem it not useful is personally not
satisfying to me.

Stefanie Schiller

 

[Pam]

Stephanie,
Thanks for your informative response. I have put together a list of 50+
problem words that we see in our business use of Word 2007. I'm not sure how
to get it to you, though. Please advise.

Our reference for correct hyphenation is the Merriam-Webster. I was
surprised to see your choices.

Thanks again for your help.
Pam

 

[Stefanie Schiller [MSFT]]

Hi Pam,

Thank you so much for your effort. I really very much appreciate this.

The best way to get the list to me is to send it via mail, either in
electronic or in printed form:

Stefanie Schiller
Building 17 / 2064
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

I cannot make promises but I will do my best to make sure that the issues
you have collected will get fixed in a future version.

Thank you so much!
Stefanie Schiller