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We’ve all done it: pressed shift+enter/return to stop a word from hyphenating. It’s quick and easy, but it’s sort of like sweeping dirt under the rug. You’ve solved one problem but created another. If you re-use that text either with different formatting, or in a different output a forced line break will almost always crop up in a very inopportune spot. Fortunately, there are plenty of better alternatives to stop a word from hyphenating, like these from Jean-Claude Tremblay:
- Select the word and apply a No Break character attribute.
- Select the word and apply the No Language character attribute.
- Add a Discretionary Hyphen in front of the word (Type > Insert Special Character > Hyphens and Dashes > Discretionary Hyphen).
- Add the word with a tilde (~) in front of it in the user dictionary.
- Use a paragraph GREP style to search the word and apply either method 1 or 2 as a character style.
This article was last modified on April 9, 2021
This article was first published on April 23, 2019
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