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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable

What CMS or editor outputs that? It's insane. I tried copying the text into a text editor and it displayed all the dashes: "math-e-mat-ics".

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Hum, so when you copy the text and post it into Notepad, it's written with a ton of dashes at places I can't make sense of (not syllables or every word). If you post it in this text box or in Word, it looks normal, I can't even figure out how to share it here (without manually "dashing") except this screenshot : https://imgur.com/DWRJlKf.

I am very confused, what's up with this?

I think they are some weird line wrapping hint characters? If I paste it into Pop OS's text editor I can only see the dashes if I shrink the editor to cause word wrapping, and it will insert the dashes at the wrap. It seems like some UTF magic that I hate!

The character is Unicode U+00AD, the soft hyphen: "= discretionary hyphen" / "commonly abbreviated as SHY" / "an invisible format character indicating a possible hyphenation location"

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf

I know of it, but apparently I've never previously pasted text using it into my text editor, because it's displayed there as a hyphen (though it is still U+00AD).

I'm wondering what CMS/editor outputs so many SHY characters.

It appears to be a site generated with react+Gatsby. Would be interesting to figure it out which text component is responsible for this odd text decoration

Likely, the site was set up before all browsers supported automatic hyphenation (fairly recently), and the soft hyphens were added to assist with hyphenation.

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