InDesign Tips: Controlling Line Breaks with the Hyphenation Slider

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It’s a small detail but it reveals a lot about your page-layout skills. Bad line breaks and poor hyphenation can doom a design and interfere with the reader’s enjoyment of the text. Controlling H&Js in many programs involves entering numeric values to set line-break limits and hyphenation stacks — a not terribly intuitive process. InDesign 2.0 gives you those same controls, but also adds something called a hyphenation slider, which lets you adjust line length and hyphenation zones through visual feedback.

The hyphenation slider is one of those interesting little inventions hidden in the recesses of InDesign. This tutorial from InDesign evangelist Tim Cole shows you where to find and how to use the hyphenation slider.

We’ve posted this story as a PDF file. All you do is click the “Controlling Line Breaks with the Hyphenation Penalty Slider” link to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.

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  • Anonymous says:

    The immediate paragraph under the Hyphenation Window sample on the InDesign Tips: Controlling Line Breaks and Hyphenation Page has a error. It reads: This tutorial from InDesign evangelist Tim Cole [shoes] you where to find and how to use the hyphenation slider. I think it’s suppose to read: This tutorial from InDesign evangelist Tim Cole [shows] you where to find and how to use the hyphenation slider.

  • Terri Stone says:

    Thanks for pointing out that typo, made 6 long years ago!

    Terri Stone
    Editor in Chief, CreativePro.com

  • Anonymous says:

    I simply and quickly wanted to know where to find it – not having used it for sometime. Your PDF-browser does not work. I don’t want teh hassle of saving the fie then viewing it!
    KISS – Keep It Simple

    Even your CAPTCHA isn’t simple.

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