Unfortunately, `hyphens: auto;` is still not supported on Chrome Windows. I still recommend using it, as it brings nicer layout to the ones you can see it (http://caniuse.com/#search=hyphens) and does not break the layout for others.

CSS Text 4 drafts might bring massive improvements for text handling and will give more fine grained controls over hyphenation, such as `hyphenate-limit-lines` (https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#hyphenate-line-limits), but obviously this is nothing that will make it to stable browsers in the near future. Still, the changes that might come for CSS with this draft would bring it a lot closer to LaTeX or InDesign.

I find it sad that what has been holding this back for years is "how will we download dictionaries":

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=605840

Especially considering LaTeX had this right for decades - and it is one of the major issues for good and pleasant readability... sigh.

I don't even understand their logic here:

> Linux and Windows don't have built-in dictionaries.

Every Linux distribution I've ever been on has had a dictionary. I'm not sure what package it's in, but the point is that packages exist, and can be depended on (or, although I dislike this, vendored in).

(Is it perhaps that they need a dictionary with the syllabic breakdown of the word? IDK if the normal dictionaries will give you that, or if it can be computed or heuristically determined?)

(Edit: e.g., on Ubuntu, the "text" category includes a number of dictionaries in various languages … http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/text/ )

Normally /usr/share/dict/words

Def on my Mac and CentOS boxes.

Package is words.noarch for the latter.

The justified alignment looks sub-par in places, like in the middle of the first paragraph of the example pages. Flush left alignment normally is the better option, if you don't have a hyphenation engine.

Browser inserted Soft-Hyphens could fix this, but since they are language dependent browser support is spotty: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens#Sugges...

By itself most browsers can break soft-hyphens pretty reliable, but they have to be generated first: See https://github.com/mnater/Hyphenator or https://github.com/bramstein/hypher

It really baffles me that some formatting engines require that soft-hyphens be pre-inserted. For eBooks, particularly. Apparently Kindle supports hyphenation only if the book has explicit soft-hyphens. Google Books doesn't seem to support it at all. Meanwhile, FBReader does a perfect job of hyphenating arbitrary ePubs. TeX has done it right since what, 1983?

Yes, hyphenation is language-specific, but if your application is laying out blocks of text, a set of hyphenation tables is a basic part of language support.

The CSS text module has some support for various text manipulations (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Text) but it's obviously not quite as extensive as LaTeX or InDesign or whatever.