Burmese text in editor not properly cut-off (hyphenated/hyphenation rule?) when moving to next line

I’m afraid I’m going to need more of your help on this, @infowizard . I thought this would be easy, but it turns out to be more complicated than I had hoped.

Could you put together a tiny Tinderbox document with a note that contains a short phrase in Burmese, in a fairly large font — say 18 or 24pt. It should fit on one line.

In a second note, could you indicate

• The locations of possible line breaks
• The locations of possible hyphenated line breaks, if not good line break is available.

Example in English:

phrase: The quality of mercy
good breaks: The/quality/of/mercy
hyphens: The quali/ty of mer/cy

  • A hyphen is not allowed here, but I had to look up the rules. In fact, I initially preferred the hyphen after “L” to the hyphen after “I”.

Thank you for your quick responses. Here is the test file Myanmar Test File.tbx (129.7 KB). For Burmese, there is no hyphenation. If you need more samples please let me know.

I am on macOS Sonoma 14.5 and the Tinderbox version is 9.7.3 (b673).

One more detail: on your machine, what is the first language in your list of “preferred languages”?


Here it is.

Just as an experiment:

  1. Move Burmese to the top of the list.
  2. Just to be sure, restart
  3. Try the test file. Does the behavior change?

This particular issue concerns an internal setting in the base class of the text pane, which (apparently) sets default word break policy based on the most preferred language. If that’s the issue, I’m sure we can work around it. But it would be good to narrow things down.

I assume that means macOS (i.e. re-boot the Mac), as opposed to just Tinderbox, lest it be presumed otherwise.

In this rare case, I think it’s worth restarting macOS. The documented dependence is quite strange, so it might be good to be cautious.

Here’s an example from your sample

ကမ္ဘာဂြိုဟ်သည် လူသားများ၊ 
တိရစ္ဆာန်များ....

Your guide says the first line should break before the ; the Mac seems determined to keep များ၊ together. Is this a bad break?

This is not a bad break. ‘၊’ in English is ‘,’. Therefore, ‘၊’ right behind the preceding word would actually be considered good break.

I put Burmese as primary, restarted macOS and tested.

However, the issue remains. The words in red font should stay together.

But this isn’t the passage in your test file.

ကမ္ဘာဂြိုဟ်သည် လူသားများ၊ တိရစ္ဆာန်များနှင့် အပင်များ ရှင်သန်နေထိုင်ရာ ဂြိုဟ်တစ်ခုဖြစ်ပြီး၊ နေမှရေတွက်ပါက တတိယမြောက် ဂြိုဟ်တစ်စင်း ဖြစ်သည်။ ကမ္ဘာတွင် ဂြိုဟ်ရံလတစ်စင်းသာရှိသည်။ ကမ္ဘာသည် နေကို ၃၆၅.၂၅၆၄ ရက်တွင် တစ်ကြိမ် လှည့်ပတ်နေပြီး ၎င်းကိုပင် တစ်နှစ်ဟုသတ်မှတ်ကြသည်။

Here is the file with more text for testing.
Myanmar Test File 2.tbx (213.0 KB)

I have found something interesting. The word breaks have issues only in “Text” mode. When I see the “Preview”, the word breaks are correct. I have made a video here Burmese-Text-Viewing.mp4.

By toggling the “Text” and “Preview” back and forth, I believe you would be able to identify what the good word breaks are. Please let me know if you need more data for testing. Thanks for focusing on this bug.

I have a new theory on this. Just wanted to say that we’re doing what we can!

Thank you for letting me know. If you need any more data or sample, I am here to support you.