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Tip of the Week: Breaking Words With Discretionary Hyphens

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This InDesign tip on breaking words with discretionary hyphens was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on October 19, 2017.

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To manually break a word at the end of a line, you can use a discretionary hyphen. Put your cursor where you want to break the word.

Then choose Type > Insert Special Character > Hyphens and Dashes > Discretionary Hyphen or Command/Ctrl+Shift+-(Hyphen).


If type should reflow so the word is no longer at a line ending, the discretionary hyphen disappears.

Erica Gamet has been involved in the graphics industry for over 35 years. She is a speaker, writer, trainer, and content creator focusing on Adobe InDesign, Apple Keynote, and varied production topics. She is a regular presenter at CreativePro Week, regular contributor to CreativePro Magazine, and has spoken at Canada’s ebookcraft, Adobe MAX, and Making Design in Oslo, Norway. Find Erica online at the CreativePro YouTube channel, CreativeLive.com and through her own YouTube channel. When she isn’t at her computer she’s probably daydreaming about travel or living in a Nordic noir landscape.

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  • Masood Ahmad says:

    Hi Erica,

    The snapshot under “Then choose Type > Insert Special Character > Discretionary Hyphen or Command/Ctrl+Shift+-(Hyphen).” needs to be corrected.

  • Masood Ahmad says:

    Fatos… :) :) :) :) :) :)

  • Deborah Winfield says:

    Hi. I have an issue with a left-aligned paragraph of text where there is one word that I would like to be hyphenated so half of the word sucks up to the line above to remove an orphan at the end of the paragraph. However, although the half word (work-) fits perfectly on the line above if I just manually stick a hyphen in it and a space after, when I use the discretionary hyphen (which I want to do), it wants miles of space left at the end of the line before it will hyphenate it i.e.; I need to have -40 letter spacing (which I won’t do) before it will take ‘work-‘ up to the line above. There is plenty of space for it but it won’t do it. Any suggestions?

    • Erica Gamet says:

      I think the reason it works manually is that you have put a space after, which adds to the calculation. Have you tried changing the paragraph to single line composer and see how that looks? Of course, this will be a paragraph style override. Also, you could manually set the hyphenation for the full word, by going into Spelling > User Dictionary and putting in a tilde (~) after the “work” part of the word.

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