Hyphenate.dev: illustration of TeX's hyphenation algorithm
Details
- External ID
- 48482798
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Hyphenate.dev: illustration of TeX's hyphenation algorithm
- Website domain
- hyphenate.dev
- Launched
- June 10, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.12568306010928962
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
As part of the Texcraft project I've been re-implementing Donald Knuth's TeX in a modular way. One of the goals of Texcraft is to be able to use these modular pieces in different contexts. hyphenate.dev is a website that uses my re-implementation of TeX's hyphenation algorithm to visually illustrate how the algorithm chooses hyphens.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche developer utilities and toolchains
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- visualization of tex hyphenation algorithm
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The visual web UI is simple, but accurately re-implementing Donald Knuth's classic Liang hyphenation algorithm with exact TeX trie mechanics and pattern scoring requires deep algorithmic parsing.
What it would actually take: Requires implementing Franklin Liang's hyphenation algorithm via compressed trie data structures storing hyphenation patterns and inter-character values, compiled to WebAssembly (e.g., via Rust or C) and wired up to interactive DOM elements to visualize step-by-step competing pattern matches.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Feature requests: Use longer default examples like 'nevertheless' to show odd/even patterns, Showcase words with both positive and negative hyphenation patterns
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 22 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #22 of 23 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 224 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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