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TypeTalk: Hyphens at Your Discretion
It's much better to use discretionary hyphens than to manually enter the hyphen character. Not only do discretionary hyphens disappear when text reflows and they're no longer needed, but they can even prevent character strings -- like URLs -- from breaking. Here's how to use them.
Written by Ilene Strizver on December 30, 2008
Categories: Fonts, Typography
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Q. An important job just came back from the printer with a hyphen in the middle of a word where it doesn’t belong. Is there a way to avoid those nasty hyphens that can appear unexpectedly when text reflows?
A. This can happen when someone enters a manual hyphen at the end of a line to tweak a rag, and then later edits make the text reflow.
The best way to avoid this major typo is to use a discretionary (soft) hyphen instead of a regular (hard) hyphen when making manual word breaks at the end of a line. A discretionary hyphen becomes invisible when not needed; that is, it appears only when the word in question is at the end of a line and disappears if the text reflows and the word in which it's placed no longer needs to break.
To access a discretionary hyphen in InDesign, use Command/Control+Shift+hyphen. In QuarkXPress, use Command/Control+hyphen.
The discretionary hyphen also has a lesser-known but very useful function: Place it in front of a word (or a string of characters acting as a word), and the software will never hyphenate that word. (The hyphen, of course, remains invisible.) This is a good way to prevent email addresses, URLs, phone numbers, proper nouns, and words in headlines from being split in two by your application’s automatic hyphenation settings. Note: Quark 7.x only calls this a Word Joiner, which is a separate Special (nonbreaking) character.
The upper example shows an undesirable line-break in the middle of a phone number. When a discretionary/nonbreaking hyphen is placed before the phone number, as indicated by the white box in the lower example, the phone number will not break.
Love type? Want to know more? Ilene Strizver conducts her acclaimed Gourmet Typography workshops internationally. For more information on attending one or bringing it to your company, organization, or school, go to her site, call The Type Studio at 203-227-5929, or email Ilene at info@thetypestudio.com. Sign up for her e-newsletter at www.thetypestudio.com.
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Another option (InDesign)
When using InDesign, I usually use "No Break" found in the "Character" palette. Highlight your word/phrase/phone number that you don't want to break, and then click the extra options in the Character palette, and choose "No Break" and you're all set.
Thanks for the new method
Like kelle, I used the "No Break", but I like this method since I only need to know one shortcut to do two jobs. Thanks!