TypeTalk: Hyphens at Your Discretion

TypeTalk is a regular blog on typography. Post your questions and comments by clicking on the Comments icon above. If Ilene answers your question in the blog, you’ll receive one Official Creativepro.com T-Shirt!
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.

Ilene Strizver is a noted typographic educator, author, designer and founder of The Type Studio in Westport, Connecticut. Her book, Type Rules! The designer’s guide to professional typography, is now in its 4th edition.
  • kelle says:

    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.

  • nonsuch says:

    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!

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