Book writing software for writing a novel in Hungarian

Why Galley is the right book writing software for a novel in Hungarian

Hungarian asks two specific things of a book tool and most tools fail the first one silently.

The first is ő and ű. They take a double acute, two separate strokes leaning the same way, and they are not umlauts. A font with shallow coverage substitutes ö and ü, or fakes the mark by shifting an umlaut, and the result is a page that a Hungarian reader finds wrong without necessarily being able to name why. Every face on the Hungarian shelf carries a real double acute.

The second is hyphenation. Hungarian is agglutinative and the words get long, so a justified page without hyphenation opens holes. Galley carries Hungarian patterns and applies them in the print PDF when you justify. Justification is off by default, and ragged right never needs it.

Then there is the market, and it is closed at one end: Amazon does not list Hungarian in any format. So the print-ready PDF and the valid EPUB are the whole product, and Galley makes both without shaping either for a store that will not take them.

Everything else is the same app: a true book page at your trim, the story bible beside the manuscript, a print-ready PDF and a valid EPUB.

How Hungarian gets typeset

Hyphenation follows Hungarian rules, in the justified print PDF only.

The double acutes go all the way through, including into the download filename, so a book called Hosszú Őszök arrives under its own name.

Sorting is Hungarian, so the digraphs and the accented vowels land where a Hungarian reader expects them.

Italics work. All fifteen faces ship a drawn italic.

The typefaces you get for Hungarian

Fifteen faces, all under the SIL Open Font License. The double acute is the coverage test here.

EB Garamond is the safe first choice for a novel.

Charis SIL has the deepest diacritic coverage on the shelf.

Vollkorn is warm and a little heavy, and it holds at small sizes.

The rest of the shelf: Crimson Pro, Cormorant, Lora, Libre Baskerville, Literata, Source Serif 4, Spectral, Alegreya, Cardo, Gentium Book Plus, Newsreader and Libre Caslon Text.

What you will not find here: Bodoni Antiqua’s Hungarian cuts and the commercial revivals of Kner Imre’s house faces. The typeface documentation lists every face by language.

Exports for a Hungarian novel

• Print-ready PDF at your trim, mirrored margins, real gutter, font embedded.
• EPUB 3 with your cover, tagged hu.
• Store-ready EPUBs for Kobo and Apple Books.
• Word and Markdown for a szerkesztő or an archive.
• Manuscript format, double-spaced.
• A proofreading PDF two pages to a sheet, and a large print PDF.
• A watermarked copy per beta reader.

The Amazon-shaped tools switch off on a Hungarian book and say why.

Hungarian punctuation

The quote pair you get automatically, and it is worth naming what makes it Hungarian: the opening mark sits low and the closing mark points right, which is not the German pair even though the opening mark is the same character.

Hungarian dialogue is set with a dash at the head of the line, which is a character you type.

The dialogue punctuation rules and dashes, hyphens and ellipses sheets cover the general cases.

How long a Hungarian novel is

Hungarian publishing counts in szerzői ív, one ív being 40,000 characters including spaces. Galley counts words, so expect to convert: Hungarian runs roughly 7 characters per word with spaces, which puts an 85,000 word novel near 15 ív.

The word count to page count converter turns a length into a page count at your trim.

Trim sizes for a Hungarian book

Six standards, from mass market at 4.25×6.87 inches to Royal at 6.14×9.21. Hungarian trade fiction is commonly issued around 13×20cm, close to the Digest at 5.5×8.5 inches. The spine width calculator and the trim size comparison would be helpful here.

Metadata and the copyright page

The copyright page writes itself from the metadata you filled in. A Hungarian ISBN comes from the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár.

One thing to set correctly: Hungarian puts the family name first. The metadata field takes whatever you type, and the copyright page prints it as you entered it, so enter it the way you want it printed.

Translating into or out of Hungarian

A translation in Galley is its own book: its own language, its own typeface shelf, its own ISBN, its own cover, still linked to the original, with the editor split so the original sits read-only beside what you write.

There are pages on writing a novel in Romanian, writing a novel in Czech and writing a novel in Finnish.

No machine touches the prose. Galley has no AI anywhere near your writing.

Self-publishing and traditional publishing in Hungarian

Self-publishing. Amazon is closed, so print goes through a Hungarian printer or IngramSpark and the ebook goes to Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo or a Hungarian store.

Traditional publishing. Hungarian houses read submissions directly, and support from the national cultural funds is part of how literary fiction gets published. The submission package assembles the synopsis, the bio and the opening chapters.

The same book exports both. The longer arguments are in Galley for self-publishing and Galley for traditional publishing.

Where to go next

• Writing software for novelists who don’t write in English covers every script Galley sets.
• Book design and typefaces lists every face by language.
• Series and translations covers the full language list.
• Book typography basics is the set of rules that makes a page look made.