The editorial “Lerning to spel is crewshul,” on spelling and the Tribune’s adventures with simplified spelling back in Tribune Publisher Robert R. McCormick’s time, was amusing. Far less amusing is the Tribune’s failure to get a decent computer program for hyphenating words that have to be broken at the end of a line. For a striking example, recent pieces hyphenated Ronald Reagan’s name as “Re-agan” when it obviously should be “Rea-gan.”
As one who as been a professional compositor, I shudder every time I see one of these little horrors. There’s no excuse for it. The Tribune can afford a proper hyphenation program, preferably one that uses a built-in dictionary to check every word, and asks the user to indicate hyphenation points whenever it encounters a new word. All respectable word-processing programs have this feature.
