Reveal and Customize Hyphenation Break Points
As an InDesign user lamented in a recent post on a forum, there’s no keyboard shortcut (a la Ventura Publisher) or dedicated menu command (a la QuarkXPress) to see the possible hyphenation points in a word. That is, in a multisyllabic word, between which two syllables does InDesign’s dictionary prefer to hyphenate it when it must, and where are the other possible breakpoints in the word that the dictionary will consider? He’d been looking for an hour in InDesign and couldn’t figure out how to reveal this information.
Actually, the feature is only a little bit hidden in InDesign, in the Edit > Spelling > Dictionary… command. (If you do this a lot you might want to assign a custom keyboard shortcut to the command.) When you choose Dictionary…, a dialog box opens that lets you enter the word for which you’d like to check spelling or hyphenation points. (If you select a word in your document before choosing the command, the word is automatically entered in the field.)
When the word is in the field, click the Hyphenation button to reveal the breakpoints the dictionary knows about. One tilde (~) is the preferred location, two tildes indicates a less satisfactory alternate breakpoint, and three tildes indicates InDesign’s last choice.
If that’s all you want to know, you can click the Done button and be on your way. If you want to customize the breakpoints, go ahead and insert or remove tildes as you deem fit, following the rule of one tilde = preferred, more tildes = okay to break here if the preferred location doesn’t work. Adding a tilde in front of the first character and removing all the other ones from the word tells InDesign “Don’t hyphenate this word, ever.”
When you’re done customizing the hyphenation breakpoints, click the Add button to save your hyphenation exception to the dictionary. When you click the Done button, InDesign runs through your document and recomposes it with your exceptions as necessary.
Uh … yeah. I was just testing you.
Correction made … must have been in a dyslexic mood when I wrote that!
Something else worth noting, I think, is the fact that if you’re going to create a custom dictionary, you’re going to want to share it with anyone else working along with you
I thought it was the other way around. One tilde is the preferred break point. At least according to my experience and the Help file.
This is an extremely useful tip for me. I have instances of a hyphenated product name that I want to never break and ID wants to break it after the hyphen in the name. Adding the tilde before the word in the dictionary just saved me lots of tweaking.
What if my User Dictionary has no entries? Every word that I test has no hyphenation rules at all. We run on non-admin accounts. Could that be the issue?
While editing /mounting text in InDesign there are
foreign words and e-mail addresses that I don’t
want hyphenated.
I wish there was a possibility to select a word and
give a command “don’t hyphenate”.
I don’t want to enter them it in a catalogue with a
tilde in front of them, I might never write it again
(and if I did I might want to hyphenate it!)
I agree with Par Lindstrom. I need to occasionally over-ride a one-time occasion of a hyphenation. I don’t want to affect the text flow of other chapters in a book, just the one occurrence that is “ugly.” Is there a way to do this?
To prevent a specific word from breaking you just select the word and apply “no break” to the word…
If you want to set all such words to not hyphenate you can use search and replace to search for the word and apply no break to all instances.
In-Design hyphenates French text according to English break points. So basically it is anglicizing French text. Is this correct? If so, is there a method of switching to language-specific auto-hyphenation?
@Nick: You can choose French from the Character panel or the Control panel (in character formatting mode). Or you can make a French language character style to the text. That should work, no?
Thank you for your reply David. We already tried that. I guess the French language dictionary is not of high quality and allows words to break incorrectly.
It should be mentioned for the record that InDesign Magazine issue 21, in Pariah Burke’s article ‘Manuallinebreakitis’, he says (seemingly incorrectly) that the more tildes, the stronger the weight given to breaking the word there. But it’s the reverse, right? One tilde has the most weight?
Aaron, you’re right, one tilde = top hyphenation point priority. But it’s easy to reverse them by accident, happens to me all the time .
As it did in the first version of this post! lol ….
Since then I’ve trained myself to think of the # of tildes as equivalent to rankings: the number 1 choice, number 2 choice, and number 3 choice. So one tilde = number 1 choice, two tildes = second choice if number 1 isn’t possible, three = third choice.