P.G. wrote:
I am proofing an InDesign document, and it has some awful hyphenations. For example, I’ve just run across bir-thday, war-ning, and alt-hough! Why is InDesign hyphenating those words wrong?
This is a tricky one, but here’s my theory: I’m guessing that the Language setting is wrong for that text. Remember that language is a character attribute (every word — even each character — can have its own language), but it may be set incorrectly in the paragraph style.
When I try setting the words you mentioned to Spanish, they hyphenates the way you describe. Similarly, when I apply the German language to the word darkness it hyphenates dar-kness.
[Update: I asked P.G. about this, and he confirmed that indeed, this was the problem… though in some cases the language had changed to Norwegian.]
Two more posts on language:
- Why Red Squiggly Underlines When Words are Not Spelled Wrong
- Changing the Language with Find/Change
- Turning Off Hyphenation for URLs
Hope that helps!
This article was last modified on December 30, 2021
This article was first published on January 6, 2014
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