NSTextView always uses system language when hyphenating?

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Created May ’21

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It seems to me that English texts will get better hyphenation if the system language in macOS is set to English. It is hard to be sure, but I think that when my system is set to Swedish, I see a lot more hyphenations like "somet-hing".

This is on macOS Big Sur, in an NSTextView with hyphenation switched on by setting hyphenationFactor to 1 on an NSParagraphStyle object in an NSAttritributedString, not a web view or anything like that. The application is not localized, so the app language is English. Setting NSAccessibilityLanguageTextAttribute to "en-US" seems to have no effect.

I'd like to know if anyone can confirm this, and if so, is there anything to do about it?

Answered by Dalaplan in 673459022

I got this reply on StackOverflow:

NSAttributedString reads the language from NSUserDefaults with key NSHyphenationLanguage. This is undocumented and may not work in every version of macOS.

I guess that is as close to a fix for this as I am going to get.

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Answer 1

Dalaplan OP

May ’21

It was pointed out to me that the documentation for hyphenationFactor states "This property detects the user-selected language by examining the first item in preferredLanguages." So I guess there is no way to change this undesirable behaviour.

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Answer 2

Dalaplan OP

May ’21

Accepted Answer

I got this reply on StackOverflow:

NSAttributedString reads the language from NSUserDefaults with key NSHyphenationLanguage. This is undocumented and may not work in every version of macOS.

I guess that is as close to a fix for this as I am going to get.

0