Movable Type Plugin: Hyphenation

Hyphenation for Movable Type is a plug-in for Movable Type 4 that provides automatic hyphenation of your text based on OpenOffice hyphenation dictionaries.

Automatic hyphenation is very useful if you often use left-aligned or right-aligned images with text flowing along the side of the image in a narrow column. With Firefox 3, hyphenation is now displayed on all major browsers.

The screenshot below is an actual example of Hyphenation for Movable Type in action:


Once installed and properly configured, the plug-in provides automatic hyphenation of your entry text.

Requirements

• Movable Type 4
• Downloaded OpenOffice hyphenation dictionary files.
  

Installation

1. Download Hyphenation for Movable Type, and extract the archive file.
   
2. Upload the contents of the archive to the "plugins" folder in your Movable Type installation. (There should now be a directory called "Hyphenation" in the plugins directory.)
3. Download your preferred OpenOffice hyphenation dictionary from the OpenOffice localization web site.
4. Go to the system administration and select the plug-ins settings. Use the Hyphenation's "Install New Dictionary" button to install the downloaded hyphenation dictionaries (you don't need to unzip them).
5. Go to Preferences -> Plugins for each of the blogs where you want to enable Hyphenation for Movable Type.
6. Check the "Enable" box.
7. Select your preferred default hyphenation dictionary from the drop-down box. The list should contain the dictionaries that you installed earlier.
8. Save your changes.
   
9. Edit the templates that display entries (in the MT4 default templates, these would be the "Entry Detail" and the "Entry Summary" template modules), adding the tag modifier (i.e., global filter) hyphenate="1" to the <$MTEntryBody$>, <$MTEntryMore$>, and <$MTEntryExcerpt$> tags; for example:

<$MTEntryBody hyphenate="1"$>

As of version 1.0 (out soon!) you should also add the tag modifier hyphenate="0" in your feed templates (the RSS and the Atom feeds) to explicitly disable hyphenation in your feeds.

Usage

Hyphenation for Movable Type has two modes of operation: it either hyphenates all text in your entries, or only the text you've marked for hyphenation. Since automatic hyphenation of all text will significantly increase the size of your HTML pages, you should consider manual selection of the text that should be automatically hyphenated.

To indicate that a text section should be automatically hyphenated, enclose the text between the tags [hyphenate] and [/hyphenate] in your entry.

You may specify an alternative dictionary for a particular text section by adding the attribute dict="xx_YY" in the [hyphenate] tag, where xx_YY is the name of the alternative directory. For example, if your default hyphenation dictionary is en_US, you might specify a German dictonary by enclosing the German text within the tags [hyphenate dict="de_DE"] and [/hyphenate].

The tags will be stripped from your entries if Hyphenation for Movable Type is disabled, or if hyphenation for your template has been explicitly turned off with the tag modifier hyphenate="0".

(Please note that if you installed version 0.1 of Hyphenation for Movable Type, you'll have to install your dictionaries and select your default dictionary.)

To report bugs or request features, please use the comments.