Tip of the Week: 5 Ways to Get Better Hyphenation
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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.
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I highlight the word I don’t want to break and style it No Break in the Character menu. Then I make a Character style called No Break, being careful not to include any other features. This is a great use for CC Libraries. Then that style is always available to me.
But be aware that this can conflict with other character styles that maybe already applied, e.g. italics, smallcaps, bold, etc.pp. Then you have to create character styles like italic-nobreak, bold-nobreak and so on.
I also adjust the justification settings to allow for some negative and positive character spacing. That cleans up a lot of the ugly holes in unhyphenated, justified type.