I'm using Docbook-XSL and Apache FOP to generate PDF documents containing tables. With the default settings, tables have fixed-width columns and lines wrap at word boundaries. But if a word is longer than the cell width, it overflows the cell. I'd like to break up the words across multiple lines in such a case. How could this be done?
Hyphenation is not a solution since the words need not be in English. (Edit: hyphenation in other languages is not a solution either. It may not be known ahead of time what language the data is in, and there may be "words" that cannot be hyphenated, such as numeric strings.)
I found suggestions to use keep-together.within-column="always" for fo:table-rows, but that didn't seem to have any effect.
(Edit:) Another suggestion was to insert zero-width spaces between all characters. But this also breaks short words mid-word. I would need a solution that breaks at word boundaries whenever possible, and mid-word only when needed.
FOP, like just about every FO processor, can hyphenate languages other than English. See http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/2.1/hyphenation.html
You could try using an FO processor, such as Antenna House AH Formatter, that implements 'auto' table layout and can adjust the widths of the table columns depending on where the text can break (as well as do hyphenation for multiple languages).
Other answers for breaking text in table cells are at: