Tip of the Week: Controlling Hyphenation

Mike Rankin

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This tip was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on March 5, 2015.

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If you don’t like the way InDesign hyphenates a certain word, you don’t have to fix the problem manually again and again. You can change the default hyphenation—or tell InDesign you don’t want a word to be hyphenated at all. Here’s how.

Just select the word in your document and choose Edit > Spelling > User Dictionary.

The word will automatically be entered in the dialog box.

Click the Hyphenate button. Tildes indicate where the word can be hyphenated, and the number of tildes in a row indicates the hyphenation priority. One tilde (~) indicates the most desirable hyphenation position. Two tildes (~~) indicate a less desirable hyphenation position. Three tildes (~~~) indicate the least desirable hyphenation position.

Add or remove tildes to match your desired hyphenation. Or, to indicate that a word should not be hyphenated at all, put a single tilde before the first letter.

Bonus tip: if the word includes an actual tilde, type a backslash before the tilde (\~).

In the Target menu, you can choose to make your custom hyphenation apply to just a single open document by choosing it from the list, or to all documents by choosing User Dictionary.

To finish the job, click Add and Done.