Niko's Project Corner

English hyphenation algorithm in Clojure

This is noth­ing that spec­tac­ular (as if any­thing on my blog is), but I still wanted to de­scribe the out­line of the pro­ject of port­ing the hy­phen­ation al­go­rithm from PHP to Clo­jure. The im­ple­men­ta­tion is only about 80 lines of code + com­ments + 20 lines of unit tests. For com­par­ison the orig­inal PHP abom­ina­tion is about is about 160 LoCs, al­though it is a bit bloated by im­ple­ment­ing the pat­terns search via a trie data struc­ture in­stead of us­ing the str­pos func­tion.

English hyphenation algorithm in PHP

A good pre­sen­ta­tion about hy­phen­ation in HTML doc­uments can be seen here, but it is client side (JavaScript) ori­ented. Ba­si­cally you shouldn't use jus­ti­fied text un­less it is hy­phen­ated, be­cause long words will cause huge spaces be­tween words to make the line stretch out the whole width of the el­ement. I found a few PHP scripts such as ph­pHy­phen­ator 1.5, but typ­ically they weren't im­ple­mented as a sin­gle stand-alone PHP class. Since the un­der­ly­ing al­go­rithm is fairly sim­ple, I de­cided to write it from scratch.

Blogging platform — What Would T_eX Do?

I wrote this blog en­gine to en­able the cre­ation of new ar­ti­cles in L^aT_eX for­mat and ef­fort­lessly pub­lish them in Web. As a by-pro­duct it en­ables triv­ial PDF gen­er­ation of each ar­ti­cle, or even a com­bined PDF with all the ar­ti­cles con­cate­nated with a in­ter­ac­tive table of con­tents, au­to­mat­ically nu­mer­ated fig­ures with ref­er­ences from the text, and many other fea­tures that L^aT_eX users take for granted.