Typophile

InDesign problem/question

Charles Ellertson

I know this isn’t the right place, but perhaps somebody can point me to a place that can help.

In CS3, if you are using a document dictionary and add a word, the new hyphenation points are honored—unless that word is preceded by a closed-up emdash, in which case, hyphenation reverts to the hyphenation in the proximity dictionary. This behavior holds true for hyphens, en-dashes, and emdashes, whenever the the character preceding the dash/hyphen is not a space—or perhaps not one ID takes as a word boundary.

For example, if you add

part~ic~ular

and

hyph~enat~ion

to the user dictionary, the single words are hyphenated according to the new break points, but

but both

paricular-hyphenation,

and

particular—hyphenation

revert to the proximity dictionary break points.

For the compound words, you can add them to the dictionary treating the hyphen ac a character, and it works. e.g.

par~~ic~~ular-~hyph~~enat~~ion

but that is a lot of work, and em-dashes can occur with just about any words, and in any proof stage.

Any suggestions appreciated,

Charles

‹ creating NON LATIN Unicode font for Apple Macintosh ascenders cut off in MS Word ›
Theunis de Jong

Insert a miniscule space, perhaps? The hair space, for example. You can also try the non-joiner character (if I remember correctly). But chances are you can’t do that on either side of the hyphen, because it might lead to the hyphen ending up on the wrong side if it’s used in a line break. And, logically (following Adobe’s logic), “particular-” is not the same word as “particular”, so that would only halve the problem.

One would expect a hyphenated compound to honour the hyphenation of its compounds; I can’t think of a reason why not.

By the by, are these two words just random examples? It seems to me they should get hyphenated OK. (Which

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