Chapter 9. Breaking (and Not Breaking) Words, Lines, Paragraphs, and Pages

AN IMPORTANT ASPECT of typography is controlling how words, lines, and paragraphs break—or are kept together—to enhance the meaning of the text and to facilitate easier reading. At the micro level, hyphenation determines how words are allowed to break—or are prevented from breaking—across a line. In addition, certain combinations of words, most commonly proper nouns, can be prevented from breaking over a line with a No Break attribute. On a more macro level, Keep Options serve a variety of related purposes. They can be used to prevent paragraphs from breaking over a column or page, to keep heads and subheads with a specified number of lines that follow them, and to make sure that certain classes of paragraph always start in a new column or on a new page.

Hyphenation

There’s a lot of prejudice against the poor hyphen. Some designers feel that hyphens are ugly and to be avoided at all costs, as if a broken word is somehow inferior to a word with no hyphens. Used appropriately, however, hyphenation is a practical tool that helps you achieve even type color. By allowing words at the ends of lines to be broken into fragments, hyphenation keeps the amount of leftover space on a line to a minimum. As long as the breaks make sense, using hyphens is preferable to bad word spacing in justified type or uneven rags in left-aligned type. We’re used to reading hyphenated text. We do it without thinking, rarely if ever pausing to consider the hyphen’s service to the cause of readability.

Hyphenation rules vary from one style manual to another and from one language to another. Obviously we’d expect the Latvian dictionary in InDesign to break words differently than the English:USA dictionary; less expected, though, is that the English:UK dictionary hyphenates the same words differently than the English:USA dictionary. The UK dictionary breaks words by etymology, while the USA dictionary breaks them according to pronunciation. The moral of the story? Make sure you have the appropriate language dictionary selected.

Hyphenation can be labor intensive. Good hyphenation settings will address most issues, but InDesign can’t read your mind. There will be times when you’ll need to intervene to make sure words break how you want them to. Manually adjusting hyphenation should be included in the fine-tuning of your publication; text invariably gets edited throughout the production process, causing line endings to change, so there’s no point investing time in getting the hyphenation right until you know exactly what you’re working with. Try to get the client to sign off on the text content before you start manually tweaking the hyphenation. And—an obvious point—always start at the beginning of the story and work forward.

Figure 9.1 Choosing the language dictionary from the Control Panel (A) and in Paragraph Style Options (B). An example of how the USA and UK dictionaries hyphenate differently (C).

Hyphenation Options

Setting Hyphenation options is an area where relatively few InDesign users dare to tread, yet these options have a profound impact on the appearance of your type. The Hyphenation dialog box is accessible via the Control Panel menu, the Paragraph panel, or as part of Paragraph Style Options.

Words with at Least

This refers to the minimum number of letters for hyphenated words. Changing this number from 5 to 6 or 7 will result in less hyphenation.

After First and Before Last

These rather confusingly named options refer, respectively, to the minimum number of characters at the beginning of a word and the minimum number of characters at the end of a word that can be broken by a hyphen. The rule of thumb is to leave at least two characters behind and take at least three forward.

Figure 9.2 These restrictive hyphenation settings will result in fewer hyphens.

Like all rules of thumb, this has its exceptions. For example, when the first two letters are a prefix, it may be best to break the word at the prefix. Words like “realign” or “reappear” would look confusing if they were broken after “real” or “reap” because the word fragment looks like a whole word. A firm but flexible approach is therefore best when it comes to hyphenation settings. Two-letter fragments after the hyphen are always best avoided, but in rare cases even these may be the lesser of two evils. Ultimately it comes down to two things: how it looks, and whether it makes sense.

Hyphen Limit

This determines the maximum number of hyphens that can appear on consecutive lines. While you’d never want more than two consecutive hyphens, which gives a ladder effect on your column edge, it’s debatable whether setting this option to 1 is the best method of preventing consecutive hyphens. If you’re willing to work a bit harder, you can get a better result by setting this option to 0, allowing unlimited consecutive hyphens, then manually fixing any problems through a combination of tracking, rewriting, and adding discretionary hyphens.

Here are some options for fixing ladders, or cutting back on consecutive hyphens:

• Find a better break a few lines above and insert a discretionary hyphen.

• Find a line or lines where you can tighten the letter spacing with manual tracking.

• Take the tightest hyphenated line and set the last word to No Break. This will turn the word over to the next line.

• Rewrite, if you have the authority and it’s appropriate.

Figure 9.3 Hyphen Limit set to 3 (left) and 1 (right).

Hyphenation Zone

Despite the alluring name, this is nothing more than an invisible boundary set from the right margin. A larger Hyphenation Zone allows more words to be carried down to the next line, thus resulting in fewer hyphens and a harder rag. A smaller Hyphenation Zone results in more hyphenated words and a softer rag. However, the utility of this option is severely limited by the fact that it applies to ragged text only and is limited to use with the Adobe Single-line Composer.

The Hyphenation Slider

There’s always a trade-off between good spacing and hyphenation, especially when working with justified text. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the Hyphenation Slider. Better spacing or fewer hyphens: pick one, or leave the slider in the middle for a happy medium.

Hyphenate Capitalized Words

This does exactly what it says. Generally, you want to avoid breaking proper nouns, but if they occur frequently or there are a lot of them, or both, selecting this option yields better word spacing. If you do opt to break capitalized words, try to avoid breaking someone’s name the first time it appears—after that, do whatever looks best in terms of type color. A name that is familiar to the English-speaking reader more easily lends itself to being broken than one that is not.

Figure 9.4 The Hyphenation Zone is valid only with ragged text and when using the single-line composer.

Hyphenate Last Word

This is just what the doctor ordered when it comes to preventing word breaks at the end of a paragraph. Deselect this option to prevent the last word of a paragraph being hyphenated. However, even this is not set in stone: If the last word in a paragraph is very long, then consider breaking it. Should you choose to set your Paragraph Style Options to not break the last word of a paragraph and you need to make an exception, inserting a discretionary hyphen won’t work. Instead, you can manually override the paragraph style settings. With the paragraph selected, go to the Hyphenation dialog box and select Hyphenate Last Word.

Figure 9.5 Typically, it’s best to avoid breaking the last word of a paragraph (top), but when that word is long, allowing a hyphen break can improve the spacing of the paragraph (bottom).

Figure 9.6 Some hyphen examples.

Discretionary Hyphens and Nonbreaking Hyphens

Discretionary hyphens, invoked with Cmd+Shift+Hyphen (Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen), are useful when a word at the end of a line is not in your hyphenation dictionary, or when you want to break the word at a place different than that chosen by InDesign’s language dictionary. Discretionary hyphens have the good manners to disappear when not needed. If the text is edited so that the word is no longer at the end of the line, the discretionary hyphen is invisible. This makes them preferable to forcing line breaks with Shift+Return (Shift+Enter) when carrying a hyphenated word down to the next line. Forced line breaks can later come back to bite you if the text is edited, causing the line break to occur in the middle of a line rather than at the end.

A discretionary hyphen also serves another purpose: You can prevent a word from hyphenating by inserting a discretionary hyphen in front of it.

Figure 9.7 Discretionary hyphens are preferable to forced line breaks when fixing bad breaks.

Nonbreaking hyphens—Cmd+Option+Hyphen (Ctrl+Alt+Hyphen)—are used to prevent a line from breaking at the hyphen, but they do not guard against the phrase from being broken elsewhere. They are used for phone numbers or web addresses.

Figure 9.8 Nonbreaking hyphens prevent the URL from breaking at the hyphen but do not prevent it from breaking elsewhere.

Hyphenation and User Dictionaries

When a word—usually a technical term, proper noun, or expletive—is not found in your chosen language dictionary, you may wish to add it to your user dictionary. Insert your cursor in the word and right-click (or control-click on a Mac with a single button mouse) to select the Dictionary window under Spelling. Click Add to place the word in the chosen language’s user dictionary.

If you wish to add a word and specify its hyphenation breaks, click Dictionary and then click Hyphenate to view the word’s suggested hyphenation points. You can add your own hyphenation points by inserting tildes, ranking them as you go: One tilde indicates the best break, two tildes the second best, and so on. If you don’t want the word to be hyphenated, add a tilde before its first character.

Figure 9.9 Adding a word to the User Dictionary and specifying its hyphenation break(s).

Sharing or Merging User Dictionaries

If you’re part of a workgroup, make sure that each member of your team has the same user dictionary installed so that the same spelling and hyphenation rules are applied to a particular document regardless of who’s working on it. While it’s possible for multiple users to read and check against the same dictionary, only one person can add or edit words. For this reason, you’ll need to assign one person responsibility for the custom dictionary.

Assuming that person is you, to share your custom dictionary with other members of your workgroup, choose Preferences > Dictionary and click the icon for New User Dictionary. Name the custom dictionary and save it in a folder on your file server where other members of your team can access it. (The file will have a .udc extension, identifying it as an InDesign dictionary.) Click OK and you’ll now see two dictionaries listed, the default and the new one. When you run a spell check, InDesign will check the default dictionary first, then the custom dictionary. If neither contains the suspect word, it will be flagged as a possible misspelling.

Each member of your workgroup will now be able to load the custom dictionary by choosing Preferences > Dictionary, clicking the plus symbol to add a dictionary, and navigating to the server to select the custom dictionary file.

Alternatively, you can merge the user dictionary into the InDesign document. Choose InDesign > Preferences > Dictionary, and select Merge User Dictionary Into Document. On the plus side, this is one less thing to worry about. You can be sure that the text will hyphenate the same way if you’re moving a document from one machine to another. On the other hand, you won’t be able to use the same user dictionary for multiple documents.

Figure 9.10 Creating and sharing a user dictionary (left). Alternatively, you can merge the user dictionary into the document (right).

Hyphenation Dos and Don’ts

Do: Check your language dictionary. Hyphenation (and spelling) rules are based on the language dictionary specified for the text. You can choose which language to use from the Language menu on the Control Panel. Better yet, apply the language as part of a paragraph style definition. You can specify a default language in your Dictionary Preferences.

Do: Hang your hyphens. To use Optical Margin Alignment to hang the hyphens in the right margin, choose Type > Story and select the Optical Margin Alignment option. (See Chapter 7, “Alignment,” for details.)

Do: Consult a dictionary for hyphenation breaks. When inserting discretionary hyphens, divide the word after a vowel to turn over the consonant to the next line. In present participles, turn over -ing, as in walk-ing, driv-ing, design-ing. When two consonants come together, put the hyphen between them. Try to divide the word so that the first part of the division suggests what is following: conserva-tion, not con-servation; re-appear, not reap-pear; cam-ellia, not camel-lia.

Don’t: Use stupid hyphenation. Avoid breaks like crap-ulous or the-rapist.

Don’t: Hyphenate display type and right- or center-aligned text. Be sure to deselect Hyphenation in the relevant Style Sheet definitions for headlines, subheads, and right- or center-aligned text blocks.

Don’t: Hyphenate a word at the end of a paragraph. Remove the Hyphenate Last Word option in the Hyphenation dialog box to prevent this.

Don’t: Hyphenate the last word. A single word at the bottom of a column or page should not break.

Don’t: Double-hyphenate a word. This can happen if you have a long compound word that contains a hard hyphen occurring near the end of the line, but it requires a second hyphen. Select the type on either side of the hyphen and choose No Break to prevent the word from breaking.

Don’t: Use more than two consecutive hyphens. Hyphens set in a column cause an ugly ladder effect down your right margin. Turn over one of the words by selecting it and choosing No Break, or by inserting a discretionary hyphen in front of the word.

The No Break Attribute

The No Break attribute overlaps somewhat with the discretionary hyphen in terms of its utility. To prevent an individual word or a phrase from breaking, select it and choose No Break from the Control Panel menu. Whereas a nonbreaking space will permit hyphenation, using No Break guarantees that the selected words will not be fragmented.

In addition to proper nouns and product names, the No Break attribute can also be used for the following:

• To prevent the word “I” from occurring at the end of a line.

• To prevent an em or en dash from occurring at the beginning of a line.

• To prevent short words like “A,” “An,” “The,” and so on, from occurring at the end of a line when they are part of a title, such as A Winter’s Tale.

• To keep together numerical expressions like “May 31” or “8 inches,” or phrases like “Chapter 9.”

• To prevent two or more consecutive lines from starting with the same word.

Figure 9.11 Nonbreaking spaces permit hyphenation; No Break keeps the whole name or phrase on the same line.

Where No Break has the edge over nonbreaking spaces and discretionary hyphens is that it can be incorporated into a character style and, by extension, be applied automatically as a GREP style to proper nouns, product names, text strings, and so on, that you never want broken across a line.

Here’s how:

1. Make a No Break character style: From the Character Styles panel menu choose New Character Style, name it “No Break,” and in the Basic Character Formats select No Break.
2. Define the GREP style for the paragraph style where you want No Break applied. Right-click /control-click the style name in the Paragraph Styles panel and choose Edit. From the list on the left, choose GREP Style.
3. Click the New GREP Style button. From the Apply Style drop-down menu, select the No Break character style and click to the right of the To Text: field, then type the name or text string you want to prevent from breaking across a line. To apply No Break to multiple text strings, separate each one with a vertical pipe (|).
4. Select the No Break character styles you just created from the Character Style drop-down menu.

Figure 9.12 Applying a No Break character style as a GREP style.

Break Characters

There are several flavors of break character available on the Insert Break Character flyout menu under the Type menu. After the Paragraph Return, by far the most common is the forced line break (Shift-Return), which as already mentioned carries the text to the right of the cursor down to a new line without starting a new paragraph. This avoids taking on the unwanted indent and spacing attributes of the paragraph that it came from. The forced line break is also essential for contouring paragraphs when working with ragged text and for breaking lines for sense, especially in display text.

A discretionary line break is just like a forced line break, but has the good manners to disappear when the word occurs anywhere but at the end of the line, thus avoiding the possibility of the line breaking inappropriately.

The other breaks are self-explanatory and are inserted at the position of your cursor, introducing an invisible character into the text, which can be viewed when you have hidden characters shown: . When you insert one of these characters, text is forced to the next column in the current frame, to the next threaded frame, to the next page, or to the next odd or even page. Where you can predict the break—for example, if all chapter heads should start on a new right-hand page (recto)—then it’s preferable to use Keep Options to incorporate this attribute as part of the paragraph style definition.

Figure 9.13 The Insert Break Characters menu (left) and the same options available through Keep Options as part of a paragraph style (right).

Keep Options

As well as controlling how the lines of a paragraph are kept together, Keep Options controls how a paragraph moves between text frames. Keep With Previous and Keep With Next ensure that heads and subheads don’t become separated from the body text that follows them. Applying Keep With Previous to body text will carry a head at the bottom of a column or page over to the next column or page, but requires only one line of body text after the head. Alternatively, you can apply Keep With Next to the head itself and specify how many lines of the following paragraph must be kept with it.

With Keep Lines Together, you can make sure all the lines of a paragraph move together or that a specified number of lines move together at the beginning of the paragraph, the end of the paragraph, or both. This prevents widows and orphans, as discussed in Chapter 5, “Letterspacing, Tracking, and Kerning.” It is not a viable solution if you need your columns to end on the same baseline.

Figure 9.14 Keep with Previous applied to the body text after the subhead (top) and “Keep with Next 2 lines” applied to the subhead (bottom).

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Subheading

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Subheading

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Figure 9.15 The paragraph indicated in blue is shown with two lines kept together (top) and with all lines kept together (bottom).

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The Start Paragraph options ensure that certain headline levels always begin on a new page or in a new column or frame, and are especially useful for chapter or section heads.

Obviously, your paragraphs must break somewhere. Asking the impossible by setting too many Keep Options will result in Keep Violations, which like H&J Violations and Custom Tracking/Kerning can be highlighted by turning on the Composition preference (Preferences > Composition).

Figure 9.16 The Start Paragraph Next Frame attribute is useful when working with step-by-step guides to ensure that each numbered step automatically starts in a new frame.

Figure 9.17 Select Keep Violations to highlight in yellow where InDesign can’t honor the specified Keep Options.