Question about Hyphens Breaking across lines

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    • #94832

      In the publication I work for I quite often see hyphenated words that, if necessary, have no problems breaking across lines. But, in one very specific instance, it will refuse to break.

      This happens whenever I see teh pattern of: (#######)-(word)-(word). Specifically, I see things like “24,000-square-foot” fairly regularly and when the hyphenated words follow that pattern of a number followed by two words and all hyphenated, InDesign refuses to break them across multiple lines.

      I’ve tried looking at the type settings and I’ve played with the hyphen settings for the paragraph style, but nothing seems to allow it to break across lines. It’s annoying because quite often it causes a lot of space between words on the line above since the paragraph style is left justified. Anyone have any idea how I could fix this without inserting a soft return or something like that since I later have to copy and paste everything online and don’t want to have to remember every little space I put in that will end up looking funny if I don’t remove it before uploading to the website.

      It’s a very specific thing. InDesign will break across lines between the two words in the chain but not the number and the word, but if you remove the second word in the chain it breaks. Very weird.

      ****Also note that it only does this with hyphens. If I change the hyphens to en or em dashes it breaks fine, but our styles dictate very specifically when to use those instead of hyphens. I also can see hidden characters and have recreated this without any styles or formatting applied so these are definitely regular hyphens and not non-breaking.

    • #94834
      Masood Ahmad
      Participant

      Hi Edward,

      Sorry for responding so late.

      There was an article long ago on the topic you’re referring to. Check this out and let us know if there is something else we could do.

      https://creativepro.com/stop-hyphenated-words-hyphenating.php

      • #94835

        Thanks for the response Masood, really appreciate it, but my issue isn’t trying to stop compound words from breaking. It is that, from what I can tell, in this one particular case InDesign does not break the compound words and I don’t know why.

        With no styles applied to the text, if you type “24,000-square-foot” into Indesign and it does not all fit on a single line it will only break between “square” and “foot”, and not between “24,000” and “square” which has been causing me spacing issues on the line above since the text is left justified.

        I can put a soft return after the first hyphen to force the break but I was wondering if there was I way I could get InDesign to do this organically.

      • #94841

        I admit, I’ve never had that problem.

        I think it’s just a thing of your justification and what InDesign considers a good line break.

        Are you using the paragraph composer?

    • #94849

      I can reproduce this. Both Proximity and Hunspell hyphenation dictionaries produce the same result. I can’t explain the behaviour but, after a bit of fiddling, found that setting ‘Words with at least’ to 12 or greater in Hyphenation Settings allows the phrase to break after the first hyphen. Might be a bug but I have the feeling that there is logic at play here based on how ID identifies, or fails to identify, a number as a ‘word’. ID does not, as far as I can tell, hyphenate long numbers.

    • #94850

      I find it odd that it is 12 letters to which one must set ‘Words with at least’ to allow the break when I recall hearing a story about the reason there are 11 stops on the slider between Better Spacing and Fewer Hyphens. If I remember correctly, 11 was taken from an analogue dial on a mixer. Can anyone recall the details of the story?

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