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Hyphenation is a necessary evil. Without it, you’d have horribly ragged text, or holes in justified text big enough to drive a Linotype machine through. But in order to get the best-looking text, you often have to override InDesign’s defaults.
Here are 5 tips for tweaking your hyphenation for better results:
1. Pay attention to the Hyphenation settings in each paragraph style you use. That’s where you can set limits for where (and how many) hyphens are allowed.
2. You can control where a word breaks by manually inserting a discretionary hyphen, by putting your cursor where you want the hyphen to appear and pressing Command+Shift+-/Ctrl+Shift+-
3. Place a discretionary hyphen at the beginning of a word to prevent it from hyphenating.
4. If you want a word to contain a visible hyphen but not break at that hyphen, make it a nonbreaking hyphen by pressing Command+Option+-/Ctrl+Alt+-
5. You can toggle automatic hyphenation on and off by putting your cursor in a paragraph and pressing Command+Shift+Option+H/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+H or deselecting Hyphenate in the Control panel’s Paragraph Controls.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on October 16, 2018
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