In the publication I work for I quite often see hyphenated words that, if necessary, have no problems breaking across lines. But, in one very specific instance, it will refuse to break.
This happens whenever I see teh pattern of: (#######)-(word)-(word). Specifically, I see things like “24,000-square-foot” fairly regularly and when the hyphenated words follow that pattern of a number followed by two words and all hyphenated, InDesign refuses to break them across multiple lines.
I’ve tried looking at the type settings and I’ve played with the hyphen settings for the paragraph style, but nothing seems to allow it to break across lines. It’s annoying because quite often it causes a lot of space between words on the line above since the paragraph style is left justified. Anyone have any idea how I could fix this without inserting a soft return or something like that since I later have to copy and paste everything online and don’t want to have to remember every little space I put in that will end up looking funny if I don’t remove it before uploading to the website.
It’s a very specific thing. InDesign will break across lines between the two words in the chain but not the number and the word, but if you remove the second word in the chain it breaks. Very weird.
****Also note that it only does this with hyphens. If I change the hyphens to en or em dashes it breaks fine, but our styles dictate very specifically when to use those instead of hyphens. I also can see hidden characters and have recreated this without any styles or formatting applied so these are definitely regular hyphens and not non-breaking.
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