987620 - Australis menu has wrong hyphens for French

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 962884

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

The hyphenation logic is not useful, we end up with strings on two lines like that:

Nouvelle fe-
nêtre

While without hyphenation we would have it displayed correctly:
Nouvelle
fenêtre

I think that if there is the opportunity for a normal line break with a space, that's were the line break should go, here the hyphenation just makes it look broken.

Comment 1

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

Attachment: screenshot

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This isn't a fixable Firefox frontend bug. Either you want no hyphenation at all (dupe of bug 962884), which would break things (cf. bug 987615, but you can look at various screenshots of the deps of bug 944947 and friends for how broken it was with French, too), or you want manual hyphenation (for which we have bad l10n tools, which wouldn't work for add-ons, and which devolves to the current situation because you don't know where the string will need to be broken at different font sizes (yes, we size all of this in ems and not in px, but that's still not deterministic enough)) or you want better hyphenation algorithms which is apparently hard (bug 630181).

As it is, this bug is INVALID, but if you prefer to dupe it to one of the existing bugs, please do that.

Comment 3

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

I am going to dupe to bug 962884 because https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=962884#c4 is exactly what I described. Also, I was about to suggest that we could use hyphens:manual and let the localizers indicate where to break words. it's certainly not the perfect solution but it would work for all the big locales (German, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese...) that work directly on hg and are technical enough for that. it wouldn't work for the less technical localizers that only know translation, don't understand compiting and work via external translation platforms, so it's probably better to not hyphenate at all.

I have the feeling that there is no perfect solution and that no team (localizers, front end, gecko…) can fix it, I just hope that we can reach a good compromise that works for most if not all locales and, most importantly, that works for our user base. In that context, I don't think we can ship with crazy hyphenation on our  top locales like German, French and Italian, hence my duping to the 'no hyphenation' bug. 

Is it possible to have per locale css rules as we do on mozilla.org btw ?