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:
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.
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“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: https://adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.3c0655b5
Dave
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 it in a catalogue with a tilde in
front of it, I might never write it again (and if I did
I might want to hyphenate it!)
(ID CS3 Win)
@Par: Check out this post for info on turning off hyphenation for URLs and other text.
Very useful tip – I don’t know why it doesn’t have the correct name (“across column or page”, or “across frames”). I am looking now for a way to not hyphenate the last line in a paragraph (not only the last word)… Is there a way to do this easier than manually? Grep ? Script?
@liviu: I don’t think there’s any way to not hyphenate the last line. I mentioned how to do it to the last word in this comment. But you probably wouldn’t want to apply No Break to several words, as that could easily mess up the paragraph spacing.
Hello. I’m trying to turn hyphenations off. I don’t mind the word being broken and continuing on the next line, I just dont’ want the hyphen mark. I’ve gone to the hyphenation pane. Deselected “hyphenation” but this isn’t doing the trick. Do I not have something selected correctly on my page? I’m very new at this. Thanks for any info.
* “correctly” was supposed to be “incorrectly.”
I don’t think there is any way you can have a word break across lines and not have the hyphen show up. Is that normal in some languages? In English, if the word breaks, it must show a hyphen.
Marjesca, it is *possible* to do this with InDesign, but not automatically!
To break a word and not seeing a hyphen, insert a Discretionary Line Break — you can find this in the Insert Breaks submenu in the menu that pops up for text. (And if you are going this route, you might want to add a custom keyboard shortcut to it.)
It cannot be done automatically because you cannot search for automatically inserted hyphens. Also, removing a hyphen and replacing it with this break might make InDesign re-flow and re-hyphenate your text, because the amount of (visible) text changes.
Thanks very much! Okay, so you’re right, I don’t want words with no hyphens. The guy at the print shop showed me that I didn’t have all my text selected (I had only selected one section, but should have “selected all” to get all the text that spills over into the other boxes). Once we had everything selected and turned hyphens off, InDesign adjusted spacing appropriately so no words needed hyphens.