Author Topic: Soft hyphens  (Read 10527 times)

Offline Esrael

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Soft hyphens
« on: March 18, 2016, 09:48:37 pm »
Would it be possible to add support for conditional hyphenation? A case in point would be screenshot1, which is the Ufopedia entry on the Gauss Rifle in Finnish. As you can see, the third row has very little text because the word on the fourth row (twin particle accelerators in Finnish) ;D can't fit on the same row, resulting in aesthetically very unpleasant layout.

But I wouldn't ask about this if it was only about the aesthetics, but this inefficient use of text space becomes a problem in longer Ufopedia entries, such as on the Medi-kit (screenshot2). I was only able to fit in the text after I had simplified the translation and adding a couple of hyphens on the words 'haavoja' and 'tajuttoman' (on rows 5 and 11 respectively) by typing 'haavo-ja' and 'tajut-toman' in Transifex.

Now even this won't be a terrible problem, as long as in the later builds there will be no adjustments in the Ufopedia text box dimensions. But that is a completely unreasonable requirement. As soon as adjustments occur in the text boxes, the layouts for these manually hyphenated texts will go out of whack, where in this case 'haavo-ja' and 'tajut-toman' appear completely stupid.

So, if it's not too much trouble, would it be possible to add conditional hyphenation, where OpenXcom will recognize a certain symbol in Transifex as a conditional hyphen that will only be added ingame, if the particular word won't fit at the end of the row? In this case I'd type 'haavo{chyphen}ja' and 'tajut{chyphen}toman' in Transifex, or whatever symbol we choose to use (just like there are things like {newline} and whatnot).

I know that this may not be a big problem in English, for example, with many short words, and where compound words have spaces in them, unlike in Finnish, where 'post office' would be written in the style of 'postoffice' with no space between the component words. Just look at screenshot1 again with the Finnish equivalent of the twin particle accelerators and you can see how that can be a problem. ;)

EDIT: Hmm, maybe I should have posted this in the troubleshooting section instead, or something. Maybe a mod could help me out with that? ;)

EDIT 21.3.2016: And maaaaybe I should have checked Wikipedia first before coming up with the original thread name "Conditional hyphenation". In Wikipedia conditional hyphens are called soft hyphens, so I renamed the thread to "Soft hyphens". You can read more about them on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen
« Last Edit: March 21, 2016, 01:42:58 pm by Esrael »

Offline SupSuper

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Re: Soft hyphens
« Reply #1 on: March 23, 2016, 02:53:01 am »
X-COM text has never had pretty wordwrapping :P but I'll investigate if this is feasible.

Offline Slaughter

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Re: Soft hyphens
« Reply #2 on: March 23, 2016, 04:36:52 pm »
How about NOT translating the Gauss weapons' description? Mainly because the TFTD's gauss weapons make no sense - launching a sphere of galium containing anti-matter? That's not a gauss weapon. Not to mention that if anti-matter can be made so easily, why do you even need zrbite?

Whoever wrote the original description either didn't get science or was high as a kite.

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Offline Bloax

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Re: Soft hyphens
« Reply #3 on: March 23, 2016, 05:02:36 pm »
Mainly because the TFTD's gauss weapons make no sense - launching a sphere of galium containing anti-matter? That's not a gauss weapon. Not to mention that if anti-matter can be made so easily, why do you even need zrbite?
And hilariously enough you can't possibly be resistant to that shit, since anti-matter reacts very violently to non-antimatter.

so it is even more nonsensical than just that lol

Offline Slaughter

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Re: Soft hyphens
« Reply #4 on: March 23, 2016, 08:22:02 pm »
And hilariously enough you can't possibly be resistant to that shit, since anti-matter reacts very violently to non-antimatter.

so it is even more nonsensical than just that lol

Anti-Matter Resistance: -100000000% lol

Well if you have a nice eletromagnetic field, you can contain anti-matter for a while - emphasis on for a WHILE, its metastable at best if I remember right.

But that only raises further questions and if humanity by 2036 can make freaking ANTI-MATTER, one wonders why the Aquatoids are even a threat.

Offline Esrael

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Re: Soft hyphens
« Reply #5 on: March 23, 2016, 10:06:05 pm »
You know that's the thing that kept shining through when I was translating TFTD compared to EU: the inferior writing. It's less believable in many ways. One thing is the scientific aspect you guys mentioned, and then there's the overall writing style, which just seems so unprofessional and off-the-record, with Ufopedia descriptions brimming with stuff that shouldn't be written in scientific/technical reports for a top-secret military organisation, such as the gas cannon being a favourite amongst experienced aquanauts. This kind of writing is more suitable for a horror novel than a technical report.

Feels like the developers sacrificed also on the believability of the writing when trying to focus on the atmosphere and setting of the game. Or then they just had to develop the game so fast that they didn't have time to realize how cheesy their writing was for them to edit it. :-\

Offline psyHoTik

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Re: Soft hyphens
« Reply #6 on: March 24, 2016, 04:52:23 pm »
Or then they just had to develop the game so fast that they didn't have time to realize how cheesy their writing was for them to edit it. :-\
That's the point. First of all, it wasn't made by the authors of original UFO/X-COM (they only licensed the code) There are some articles on the Net about development history of TFTD. In general, first X-COM turned to be an unexpected success, so the studio demanded a sequel in six months. As the original authors said it's impossible the studio licensed the code from them and did TFTD on their own in about a year and with much bigger team than original UFO had .
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-28-the-story-of-x-com-interview?page=2
https://scientificgamer.com/in-praise-of-terror-from-the-deep/
« Last Edit: March 24, 2016, 04:54:08 pm by psyHoTik »