InDesign Tips: Controlling Line Breaks with the Hyphenation Slider

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InDesign Tips: Controlling Line Breaks with the Hyphenation Slider

Adobe InDesign 2.0 includes many special typographic features, such as OpenType support and glyph substitution. But it also gives you complete command over line breaks through its hyphenation slider. Here's how to tap into the power of this lesser-known feature of InDesign.

Written by Tim Cole on April 17, 2003

Categories: Fonts, Print, Print Design & Layout, How-Tos

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It's a small detail but it reveals a lot about your page-layout skills. Bad line breaks and poor hyphenation can doom a design and interfere with the reader's enjoyment of the text. Controlling H&Js in many programs involves entering numeric values to set line-break limits and hyphenation stacks -- a not terribly intuitive process. InDesign 2.0 gives you those same controls, but also adds something called a hyphenation slider, which lets you adjust line length and hyphenation zones through visual feedback.

The hyphenation slider is one of those interesting little inventions hidden in the recesses of InDesign. This tutorial from InDesign evangelist Tim Cole shoes you where to find and how to use the hyphenation slider.

We've posted this story as a PDF file. All you do is click the "Controlling Line Breaks with the Hyphenation Penalty Slider" link to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.

To open the PDF, you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader. Get it here: