Tip of the Week: Breaking Words With Discretionary Hyphens

This InDesign tip on breaking words with discretionary hyphens was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on October 19, 2017.

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To manually break a word at the end of a line, you can use a discretionary hyphen. Put your cursor where you want to break the word.

Then choose Type > Insert Special Character > Hyphens and Dashes > Discretionary Hyphen or Command/Ctrl+Shift+-(Hyphen).


If type should reflow so the word is no longer at a line ending, the discretionary hyphen disappears.

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This article was last modified on July 25, 2019

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