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Design doc: Soft hyphen (U+00AD) rendering #185154

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Design doc: Soft hyphen (U+00AD) rendering#185154
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📜Issue was posted to Discord. Remove to have the issue reannounced. (For "design doc", "emergency")P2Important issues not at the top of the work lista: typographyText rendering, possibly libtxtc: proposalA detailed proposal for a change to Flutterdesign docTracks a design discussion documentengineflutter/engine related. See also e: labels.team-engineOwned by Engine teamtriaged-engineTriaged by Engine team

Description

@dbebawy
dbebawy
opened on Apr 16, 2026

Document Link

https://flutter.dev/go/soft-hyphens

(Redirect PR: flutter/website#13282 — once merged the go-link will resolve; direct doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w_d53wb-RMuwXmXIPq67JrZYG97XF1mDaKEoKBDt8-E)

What problem are you solving?

Flutter text does not render a visible hyphen glyph when a line breaks on a soft hyphen (U+00AD). The line break happens, but the hyphen never appears — in contrast to every major web browser, native mobile text engine, and the Unicode specification. This makes Flutter unsuitable for any workflow relying on manual hyphenation markup (multilingual CMS content, justified/narrow-column text, long compound words in German/Dutch/Finnish, etc.).

Tracking issue: #18443 (open since 2018, 302+ reactions).

The underlying Skia fix has already landed (CL 1208837 at 98daf58d) and has rolled into flutter/flutter. The behavior is gated behind ParagraphStyle::setRenderSoftHyphens() and Flutter needs to opt in. The design doc proposes a two-stage rollout: (1) enable globally in the engine (draft PR #185152), and (2) expose a Dart-level hyphens API on ParagraphStyle/TextStyle mirroring CSS hyphens.

Activity

  1. mbcorona
    added
    engineflutter/engine related. See also e: labels.
    a: typographyText rendering, possibly libtxt
    c: proposalA detailed proposal for a change to Flutter
    team-engineOwned by Engine team
    design docTracks a design discussion document
    on Apr 16, 2026
  2. flutter-triage-bot
    added
    📜Issue was posted to Discord. Remove to have the issue reannounced. (For "design doc", "emergency")
    on Apr 16, 2026
  3. gaaclarke
    added
    P2Important issues not at the top of the work list
    triaged-engineTriaged by Engine team
    on Apr 21, 2026
  4. mboetger
    added a commit that references this issue on Oct 3, 2026

    Support soft hyphen (U+00AD) rendering with a Hyphens API (flutter#18…

    3c54508

  5. dbebawy commented on Oct 16, 2026

    @dbebawy
    dbebawy
    on Oct 16, 2026
    ContributorAuthor

    The design landed in #185152 (native) and #193850 (Skwasm), with CanvasKit in review in #194339. Closing as implemented.

  6. dbebawy
    closed this as completedon Oct 16, 2026
  7. suryaKommana2662
    added a commit that references this issue on Oct 29, 2026

    Support soft hyphen (U+00AD) rendering with a Hyphens API (flutter#18…

    0dc5b19

  8. github-actions commented on Oct 30, 2026

    @github-actions
    github-actionsBot
    on Oct 30, 2026 – with GitHub Actions

    This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. If you are still experiencing a similar issue, please open a new bug, including the output of flutter doctor -v and a minimal reproduction of the issue.

  9. github-actions
    locked as resolved and limited conversation to collaborators on Oct 30, 2026
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    📜Issue was posted to Discord. Remove to have the issue reannounced. (For "design doc", "emergency")P2Important issues not at the top of the work lista: typographyText rendering, possibly libtxtc: proposalA detailed proposal for a change to Flutterdesign docTracks a design discussion documentengineflutter/engine related. See also e: labels.team-engineOwned by Engine teamtriaged-engineTriaged by Engine team

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