Cathy wrote:
Is there an easy way to change preferences so that it will not hyphenate a hyphenated word? For instance “over-the-mountain” will break “over-the-moun-” and bring “tain” on the next line. Our editors do not like even if it breaks at “over-the-” and bring “mountain” on the next line – they consider that a bad break.
Once again, my answer depends on whether or not you work by the hour. If you’re paid hourly, then I suggest you painfully, slowly, search through the entire document for all the hyphenated words and apply the No Break style to them.
But if you’re trying to get this done efficiently, there is a super easy way to go about it: GREP Styles.
First, make a character style that simply applies the No Break formatting.
Then, in your body text paragraph style, add a GREP Style that assigns your character style to this GREP expression: \w+?-\w+?
That’s a hyphen in the middle of all that. Here’s a picture of it:
Now, this will only work with phrases with a single hyphen in them. If you also wanted to capture the “over-the-mountain” phrases, you’d have to alter this a little bit. There’s probably a clever way to do it in a single GREP expression, but I can’t think of it right now, so I’d just add a second grep style that applies the same NoBreak character style to \w+?-\w+?-\w+?
I hope that helps!
This article was last modified on December 30, 2021
This article was first published on March 19, 2014
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