Why hyphenation matters in German and Finnish headlines
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German and Finnish write compounds as single words, so one word can be wider than a whole social image. Without hyphenation the headline either overflows or is shrunk until it is hard to read. Breaking at compound boundaries, balancing the lines and avoiding a lonely last word fixes it.
The problem
"Bundesverfassungsgerichtsentscheidung" is 37 letters in one word. "Yhteistoimintaneuvottelut" is 25. At the headline sizes that make a preview readable, a single word like that is wider than the image.
A renderer that only breaks at spaces has two bad options: let the word run off the edge, or shrink the whole headline until the word fits. Both look like a mistake.
What ContentImage does
- Hyphenates with language-specific TeX patterns for fi, de, fr, es and en.
- Prefers compound boundaries: Bundesverfassungs-gerichts-entscheidung, yhteis-toiminta-neuvottelut. It uses the patterns plus a small lexicon of common compound parts for Finnish and German, so unusual compounds can still break mid-morpheme.
- Searches for the largest font size that fits the box, and accepts a smaller one, up to about 30%, when that lets a word break at a compound boundary instead of inside a syllable.
- Balances line lengths and avoids a single word alone on the last line.
- Uses the quotation marks of the language and, in French, non-breaking spaces before : ; ! ?.
Real examples from our engine
Same box, same font. Each pair shows the headline without hyphenation first, then as ContentImage sets it.
Test it on your own headlines
Paste an article URL or a headline into the demo on the home page. Try your longest title. If you compare tools, use ten real headlines in your language, not a short example.
ContentImage is free during the beta.
Get started freeFAQ
- Does CSS hyphens: auto solve this?
- In a web page, often yes, if the lang attribute is set. Social images are rendered to a bitmap by an image renderer, which has no such feature, so the line breaking has to be done before rendering.
- Are all compound breaks perfect?
- No. The patterns find syllable breaks and a small lexicon marks common compound parts. Rare compounds can break between syllables rather than morphemes. That is still correct hyphenation, just less elegant.