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.
Hi Erica,
The snapshot under “Then choose Type > Insert Special Character > Discretionary Hyphen or Command/Ctrl+Shift+-(Hyphen).” needs to be corrected.
Also the text needs to be updated to:
“Then choose Type > Insert Special Character > Hyphens and Dahses > Discretionary Hyphen or Command/Ctrl+Shift+-(Hyphen).”
Hi Masood,
Did you mean Dashes instead of Dahses? ; )
Thanks Masood! Fixed!
Fatos… :) :) :) :) :) :)
Hi. I have an issue with a left-aligned paragraph of text where there is one word that I would like to be hyphenated so half of the word sucks up to the line above to remove an orphan at the end of the paragraph. However, although the half word (work-) fits perfectly on the line above if I just manually stick a hyphen in it and a space after, when I use the discretionary hyphen (which I want to do), it wants miles of space left at the end of the line before it will hyphenate it i.e.; I need to have -40 letter spacing (which I won’t do) before it will take ‘work-‘ up to the line above. There is plenty of space for it but it won’t do it. Any suggestions?
I think the reason it works manually is that you have put a space after, which adds to the calculation. Have you tried changing the paragraph to single line composer and see how that looks? Of course, this will be a paragraph style override. Also, you could manually set the hyphenation for the full word, by going into Spelling > User Dictionary and putting in a tilde (~) after the “work” part of the word.