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Comment by mperham | Hacker News Reader

Amazon wants to auto-hyphenate based on the current screen / font. Hardcoding hyphens in an ebook will look terrible in most cases. I don't see a problem with Amazon's stance.

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I don't think that's what the author is talking about. They mean hyphenated words such as 'wind-up'. The current screen or font doesn't make a difference for whether or not that's hyphenated. You're thinking of hyphenation for splitting a word over a line.

The whole thing's clearly a confusion, with the author being a nonce as he doesn't realize it's to do with line break hyphenates and Amazon customer service being nonces because they don't realize those hyphens aren't line break artefacts and they're just cut/pasting a standard response.

i didn't think a human being could be a 'nonce', or is this some new usage i don't know about?

From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_%28slang%29

>> In the United Kingdom, nonce is a slang word for a sex offender or child sexual abuser.

Nonce means mild idiot in my social circles. I wasn't implying they were a social offender. I wasn't even aware of its implications. Learn something every day.

I'd delete the comment but HN has got ridiculously militant about that now and I can't.

In colloquial UK usage it means 'paedophile', and is generally considered offensive.

Unless they're really making claims about the person's sexuality, I'd guess the intended word was dunce, or something similar?

That's what the author thinks the problem is, but we don't know because the book isn't available and there isn't a list of the hyphenated words.

It's possible that most of those hyphens are line-break hyphens, not word-join hyphens.

The author claimed that this wasn't the case. I don't see why I would take this as a bad faith posting. You'd think if it actually were the case, Amazon would have a better way of indicating so.

I think you're confusing hyphenation as word-break, which should be automated based on font, screen size, etc. But hyphenation also applies to 2 words that have a different meaning when not hyphenated. And this brings meaning, which Amazon should not interfere with.

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