Stop Hyphenating Across Columns and Page Breaks
Luke wrote:
I wondered if there was any way of stopping InDesign from hyphenating text between frames? As it stands, I usually finish a book by running through it and fixing these, but it would be great if it could be done automatically.
Yes, many publishers and art directors dislike hyphenating words from one page to the next. The good news is that it can be prevented easily and automatically, but you need to upgrade to CS3 for this feature. The trick is to turn off the Hyphenate Across Columns checkbox, which you can find by choosing Hyphenation from the Control panel menu, or in the Hyphenation pane of the Edit Paragraph Styles dialog box:
nohyphen2
Of course, handling this inside the paragraph style is much more “automatic” and convenient.
Personally, I wish that there were two options — hyphenate across column and hyphenate across page — because I don’t mind words breaking from one column to the next on the same page, but I don’t want them breaking across a page. But the feature in CS3 will stop both from occurring.
“Stop Hyphenating Across Columns and Page Breaks!”
Sorry, but I felt that so obviously injunctive headline badly needed an exclamation point to be complete.
It’s a good little feature, but I support David’s wish for those two options.
How about another option?
Hyphenate Across Spread. This would allow hyphens as long as the hyphenated text was all on the same spread.
Most of what I do allows for hyphens from one column/page to another as long as they are on the same spread.
Are we talking about using discretionary non-breaking hyphens here, just for across spreads or pages? Yes, I did say “discretionary non-breaking hyphen”. I’ve thought about it and it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Basically, in the hyphenation you should be able to say if it’s a non-breaking hyphen or just a regular hyphen. But non-breaking hyphens remain in the text, and discretionary hyphens create a hyphen when the word is broken over a line. So in theory, a discretionary non-breaking hyphen would be ideal for not breaking the word over two pages.
How about that for an oxymoron?
I wonder if Eugene’s post needs any OXY Clean, just kidding.
Discretionary non-breaking hyphens would have to be put in manually, by some search and replace, or a script. Correct?
I think what we are looking for are the words that automatically hyphenate by InDesign when the word contains no hyphens to start with. If you are putting them in by hand then you can make them be the kind that will break or not based on content, but if I flow a 30+ page document, I don’t want to have to check each page, nor do I want to put discretionary hyphens on every word.
Did I misunderstand your post Eugene?
Well I imagine, in my head, that’s what is already used for column breaks in CS3, I’m probably totally wrong. It was the best way I could think of to describe it. I don’t know how to or if it can be programmed, but surely it can work for columns as well for pages, as already suggested in the original post.
I was merely putting a quirky term for it, Discretionary Non-Breaking Hyphen is as quirky as I could come up with.
I do a lot of text setting of academic books, where dividing words across a page break is verboten. So I was expecting this to be the killer feature of ID CS3. I was disappointed, though, that when there are footnotes on a page (and in most of my books, they appear on most pages), the last word of the main text may still divide, even when the Hyphenate Across Column box is unchecked. This means I still need to eyeball the bottom of every page to make sure there are no breaks. This is something I’d really like to see Adobe fix.
Being in a position where we (the company I work for) are soon going to upgrade to CS3, this indeed is a nice feature with which to “wow” my colleagues with. Ta.
ps. Klaus, I totally disagree about the exclamation mark, it makes it into an order, which I don’t think is the desired reading.
For those using footnotes and who want this feature, watch-out. It will sometimes put InDesign CS3 into a hard loop — no crash, but the only escape is forced quit. See: http://adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.3c0655b5
Dave