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• • December 3, 2014 at 9:14 am #72006
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    I’m working with a long document that needs to match the previous printing page for page, so I’ve been adding discretionary hyphens while manually kerning/tracking words/lines and I’m getting really frustrated with the words that I have added discretionary hyphens not breaking. Anyone know of a way to force certain words to break? I know you can add words to the dictionary and set break points, but I just want particular instances to break and not in others, hence using discretionary hyphens. I know this sounds counter-intuitive but I’m not understanding why InDesign (CC) is not recognizing the discretionary hyphens I am placing.

  • December 3, 2014 at 9:32 am #72007
    Sebastien Gauthier

    Member

    That is exactly how discretionary hyphens work… it’s up to the discretion of InDesign to decide if they are close enough to the container edge to wrap or not and if that is going to help the line spacing or not. Their main purpose is to vanish if the text is reflowed so that you don’t get frustrated about the hyphen showing in the middle of your paragraph.

    If you want to force hyphenation just use a regular hyphen and it will wrap if close enough to the edge. If in the middle of the line you could use a hyphen + soft return… but that will most likely render your text very awkward.

    Manually tracking each line of a printed document seams to me a bit counter intuitive as if you add a single word you’ll have to go throughout the document all over again. I think you should play with the H&J (hyphenation and justification) options to allows InDesign to behave the closest to what you are doing manually.

  • December 3, 2014 at 1:00 pm #72018
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    And be sure that paragraph composer is turned on.

    In addition to discretionary hyphens, I also use the “no break” (I set up a character style sheet). I use that to either force an entire word down, or if the discretionary hyphen isn’t breaking where I want, I apply the “no break” to the characters I want to force down.

  • December 4, 2014 at 5:05 pm #72053
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    Dwayne, I like that work around, I’m going to have to start including that in my Character styles.

    • December 5, 2014 at 8:18 am #72071
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      A.A.–You won’t believe how handy that no break character style sheet can be :)

      I’m glad I was able to help.

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