Question

My client has requested to enable auto-hyphenation on this page: http://carlosdinizart.com/biography/ , and I realized I’ve never actually seen it done on a web-page.

Is it possible to set up auto-hyphenation in an HTML document with just HTML/CSS? If not – what are the options?

Answer 1

CSS3 provides some support for this. Source: http://drublic.de/blog/css3-auto-hyphenation-for-text-elements/
You can check the w3c documentation here: http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-css3-text-20110901/#hyphenation

CSS3 adds six properties to the list of useful thing. These are:

• The most important one is hyphens.
• You can add dictionary-files with hyphenate-resource so the browser has a better chance to render your text with the right hyphenation.
• hyphenate-before sets a minimum number of characters before the hyphenation.
• hyphenate-after does the same as hyphenate-before but for characters after the hyphenation.
• hyphenate-lines defines about how many lines a hyphenated word is written at a maximum.
  with hyphenate-character you can specify which HTML-entity should be used, e.g. \2010.

The main property of this stack is hyphens. It accepts one of three values: none, manual or auto. The default one is manual, where you can set hyphens via ­. auto it the better one for continuous text while words get split if possible and available. And none does not hyphenate at all even if there is a character set for a possible line break in a certain word.

Update:

Browser support information here: http://caniuse.com/css-hyphens