Request Slovenian hyphenation support for Apple OS and Pages

Request for Native Slovenian Hyphenation Support in Apple Operating Systems

Dear Apple Software Localization and Internationalization Team,

I am writing to ask Apple to include native Slovenian hyphenation support in macOS, iOS and iPadOS.

Slovenian is an official language of both the Republic of Slovenia and the European Union. Despite this, Apple operating systems currently do not provide native automatic hyphenation for Slovenian, although the underlying hyphenation mechanism itself is fully supported.

During the preparation of professional books and scientific publications in Apple Pages, I found that Slovenian words are not hyphenated automatically. As a result, users must either accept poor typography or manually insert soft hyphens throughout the document.

The issue is not limited to Apple Pages. Any application relying on Apple’s system text services is affected by the lack of Slovenian system hyphenation.

The technical solution already exists. High-quality Slovenian hyphenation dictionaries and algorithms have been available for many years and are successfully used by LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Microsoft Word. This demonstrates that the necessary linguistic resources already exist and that implementation is technically feasible.

According to available information, Apple already provides considerably better hyphenation support for Croatian. Since Slovenian and Croatian are closely related South Slavic languages with similar hyphenation rules, I believe that adding Slovenian support should not represent a major technical challenge.

I kindly ask Apple to consider:

• adding native Slovenian hyphenation support (locale: sl_SI) to macOS, iOS and iPadOS;
• evaluating existing Slovenian hyphenation resources that are already publicly available;
• establishing contact with Slovenian linguistic institutions if additional language resources or validation are required.

For many professional users—including authors, publishers, translators, designers, researchers and educational institutions—native Slovenian hyphenation would significantly improve the quality of documents created within the Apple ecosystem.

I would be grateful if this request could be forwarded to the teams responsible for Software Localization, Internationalization and Text & Language Technologies.

Thank you for your consideration and for your continued support of linguistic diversity across Apple platforms.

Kind regards,

Žarko ***

***

[Edited by Moderator]