German typography

Hyphenation

Before the page is laid out, Brevier marks the places where a word may break. It reads the language from the lang attribute of the text. Text with no lang counts as German.

<html lang="de">

German compound words break between their parts first. So Versicherungs-bedingungen breaks at the joint, not in the middle of a part. English text uses English rules.

To set the language in CSS, to keep a word from breaking, or to choose where it breaks, see Company CSS.

Brevier turns off the engine's own hyphenation, so a word can only break where Brevier allowed it.

German typesetting has two more rules, and Brevier keeps both after the page is laid out:

• at most 3 lines in a row end in a hyphen
• the last line before a page break does not end in a hyphen

When a page breaks a rule, Brevier removes the break points of the word on that line and lays the page out again. The insurance letter on the templates page shows this in two narrow columns.

Non-breaking spaces

Some pairs must never be split across two lines. Brevier puts a non-breaking space between them:

Brevier leaves code, links and e-mail addresses alone.