Re: Inserting softHyphens in FO

I think it should be made clear in postings such as this
that it is not recommended to use with FOP because FOP does not
support them.

In general, XSL FO relies on proper handling of Unicode character
classes, and soft hyphen is the right way to specify custom hyphenation.

Interestingly, it is not easy to point where the spec
actually says so. Explicitely referenced is mostly the
BIDI algorithm, everything else I remember are only
rather vague formulations. Unicode TR14, which mentions
how soft hyphens have to be handled, is not even in the
bibliogaphy.

I a future revision of the XSLFO rec, they should be
a bit more explicit on their dependenciess regarding
character handling.

Zero width spaces are obviously not a solution. You don't get hyphenation.

It works where hyphens are not required or could even
be misleading, as it is often the case for URLs, product
numbers or program language identifiers. For real
(english) words, built-in hyphenation actually works
well enough.