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Comment by BbzzbB | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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!

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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