Mastering Hyphenation Options Using Adobe InDesign CC

Hey there, in this video we're going to talk about the exciting world of Hyphenation. You might love it, you might hate it, but you need to understand how to make some changes to it, to make it really work for you if you are using it.

What I've done is I've written this word in here, 'Alexandria'. Why? Because I wanted a really long name. I got a person's name. I'm going to click on the Text box, go to Type tool. And under 'Paragraph' here, I can pick the one that says 'Hyphenate'. Yours might be on by default, I've turned mine off in an earlier video. You can see, by default, it does some weird things like hyphenating here, it hyphenated our name, which is bad. Also here, it hyphenated the last word of my paragraph which just is really bad as well. It does all those sorts of weird stuff. So let's look at how to control hyphenation.

So I am going to go up to here. Under 'Paragraph' in the Burger menu, in the top right, I'm going to click on that one. I'm going to go down to 'Hyphenation'. In here, they're really weird default's down the bottom, these are always turned on. You can say, hyphenate capitalized words, and turn that off. You'll see, Alexandria now is on its own line. And obviously, lots of capitalized words are going to be like terrible words to hyphenate, it's going to be business names and countries, and first names, last names, so turn that off. Hyphenate last words, that's what this guy is. It's like, last word on a paragraph, he's like "Yes, hyphenate that by default." Terrible idea.

'Hyphenate across Columns' is another one, can you see down the bottom here? This line here ends, and then hyphenates to the next column which in our case is the next page, that's a bad idea as well. So, turning those three off will help your hyphenation at least be a little bit better, if you want to do it by default, so turn all these off by default, I'm going to click 'OK'. I'm going to save it, and close everything that I've got open. And to change it by default, we did this in an earlier video, but I just want to double check. So go from 'Start' to 'Essentials'. Grab the Type tool. Make sure you're on, actually either one of these, 'Paragraph' or 'Character'. Go out to the Burger menu, and do the changes in here. Now if I turn this on, and turn these off and click 'OK', that will then be the default forever. I don't want to do that, just because as a trainer I need to kind of keep my version of InDesign close to what my students have, but that's how to go and kind of take control of hyphenation.

Now there are going to be special instances where you want a bit more control. So let me open up the document again. So back in here, I'm going to try and make it do something. I'm going to keep typing in the word 'Furniture'. And the first one, I put in-- so keep typing Furniture close to the end of the lines, till it hyphenates. I want to show you a couple of tricks, I'm going to select the word Furniture. Let's just say it's a particular word that we use quite commonly and it hyphenates all the time. When we changed our capitalized words, don't hyphenate, obviously it's not going to apply to the word Furniture, because it's in lower case. So with it selected, we can go up to 'Edit' and let's go to 'Spelling', and go to 'User Dictionary'. Now because I had it selected, there it is there, Furniture. And if I click show me 'Hyphenation' this is the default hyphenation for this word Furniture. I'll move mine down so I can kind of see.

So it's breaking in either this option or this option. And the way InDesign works is it kind of has a priority system, so what you can say is actually-- one tilde means this wave here, this says the priority will be here, but if it doesn't work for you in InDesign, this is your second priority. So it's kind of like this, first up, second up. You might say, actually, just like, you get no option here. I want you to break there, across, after 'fur'. So you delete the other two, and you click 'Add', you'll notice the background here it went and changed, and broke exactly where I told it to. So if you've got words that you use quite commonly and it breaks really weird and you're like, "Man, I wish it didn't do that," you can add it to your User Dictionary and click on 'Hyphenate', and just tell it where to break. In our case, you've got to be careful because our hyphenation is created in a new word, we've got 'fur'. So, maybe my hyphenation. Just an example, but that's not a good one.

Let's say I never want 'Furniture' to break. You can't just do that. First of all I need to delete this one. So there's where I've gone wrong, I'm going to remove you. but up here, if you put the tilde '~' at the beginning, that tells InDesign, never hyphenate this word, if I click on 'Add' you'll notice that it doesn't hyphenate. So if you've got some words that hyphenate, that are lower case and you don't want them to just add them to your User Dictionary, put the tilde '~' in front, click 'Add', and that would then never ever hyphenate. All right, let's click on 'Done'.

One thing you can do in there, is that once you've done this, you don't-- the User Dictionary is not something you have to change the defaults for, like we've done previously, where we closed everything down and changed it. This User Dictionary will apply to all documents from now on. And what you can do is you can export this one to share with other people, maybe other colleagues or another computer that you're using so that you don't have to redo it twice. So somebody creates a great dictionary you can see in mine, I've got a few extra words I've added to my dictionary like Bitmap, and Blocky, and color. Spelt the other way, css, csv. Just so that the Spell Checker doesn’t keep asking for it. The cool thing about it, once I've done it I can export it and send to somebody else and they can go into the same setting, and click on 'Import'.

Now another thing that's kind of related to hyphenation is this. Let's say that you have two words, I'm typing in 'Oak tables'. So Oak Tables there didn't break. I'm trying to stick in a few times where it breaks. Tables, there it is there. Let's say that I like Oak tables and I never want them to be on separate lines. So I don't want it to break. There's a nice quick and easy way to say instead of using weird Shift-returns, and trying to break lines, you just select both words. Then the long way, is under 'Window', and go to 'Type & Tables', and open your Character panel. And in here, in the fly-out menu on the right there's something called 'No Break'. It just means that, that word we've highlighted won't break. It's all done for every document in every instance of our tables. It's just a great way of going through and just kind of highlighting things, and say actually I don't want these two words, say these two words, I don't want to break, for whatever reason, say, please don't break these two and leave the sucking up or pushing down to the next line.

Now the quicker way to do it is, if I undo both of these, 'Oak Table' selected, see how it opened up the Character menu as you use the Quick Select. So it's 'Command Return' on a Mac or 'Control Return' on a PC, and just type in 'No b'. 'No b' brings up no break. You can click on it there, I find that's a really quick, easy way to do it. So, these two words here, 'Command Return', 'No B', 'Return'. It just kind of forces them individually to not break. And that will be a much better way than doing potentially a soft return, which is the 'Shift Return', you're never allowed to do that.

All right, so that's kind of taking control of hyphenation. Let's look at Optical Margin Alignment in the next video. That will help us a little bit more with hyphenation, and then we can get off this super exciting topic, onto something new.