Wordaxe allows python programs to automatically hyphenate text using an algorithm based on decomposing compound words into base words.

the algorithm is suitable for any language that extensively uses closed-form compound words, as long as a base word list is provided. currently such a list only exists for german.

in addition, wordaxe implements other algorithms:

* a language-independent algorithm that only hyphenates at a few special
characters (in particular, '-').
* a (currently incomplete) port of the tex hyphenation algorithm to pure
python.
* a wrapper for the pyhnj library (called python-hyphen in debian).
wordaxe integrates with the reportlab library to provide automatic hyphenation for the paragraph line-breaking method.