Restrict hyphenation to lowercase words

[MikeTO]

Could you please add a checkbox to the hyphenation options that would allow hyphenation to be restricted to lowercase words? My book has thousands of proper names in it and Publisher is hyphenating them which I would prefer to avoid.

I'm new to Affinity Publisher but I believe the program didn't use to do this because earlier in this forum there's a 2018 feature request to hyphenate capitalized words. Adobe InDesign and apps back to the nineties have either restricted hyphenation to lowercase words or allowed the user to choose whether to include capitalized words.

Thanks!

[walt.farrell]

Some ideas for workarounds that may help you:

• If you type a soft-hyphen at the start of the word, it will be invisible in the exported text and will prevent automatic hyphenation of that word. Text > Insert > Dashes and Hyphens > Soft Hyphen. Default keyboard shortcut on Windows is Ctrl+Shift+- (probably Cmd+Shift+- on Mac).
• Alternatively, you could define a Character Text Style with a hyphenation language of None and apply it to those words.

[loukash]

On 3/19/2021 at 7:50 PM, MikeTO said:

My book has thousands of proper names in it and Publisher is hyphenating them which I would prefer to avoid.

On 3/19/2021 at 9:17 PM, walt.farrell said:

Text > Insert > Dashes and Hyphens > Soft Hyphen

To batch apply to the vast majority of possible matches, use a regular expression:

1. View > Studio > Find And Replace
2. Find > cog button > select Match Case and Regular Expression
3. Find: insert "\b(\s?[^\.]?\s\b)([A-Z]\w+)\b" (without the quotes)
4. Replace with: "$1" (without the quotes) & popup menu > Special Characters > Soft Hyphen (inserts a special symbol) & "$2" (without any whitespace and without any quotes)
5. Find – check the list of search results
6. Replace all

 

As for this  \b(\s?[^\.]?\s\b)([A-Z]\w+)\b and $1 $2 gibberish search/replace strings:

• \b = word boundary
• ( ) = parentheses create a search group
• \s = white space or line break
• ? = optional
• [^\.]? = excludes a result that contains a period if present but optionally allows characters like comma, semicolon or dash, i.e. excludes any words at the beginning of a sentence
• \b[A-Z] = looks for caps at the word beginning (Match Case must be enabled)
• \w+ = the first word character must be followed by one or more characters
• $1 = the result in the 1st search group (parentheses 1) remains unchanged
• inbetween we're inserting the soft hyphen
• $2 = the result in the 2nd search group (parentheses 2) remains unchanged

Regex is fun. I'm still learning, and stuff like this is a great exercise.
More info: regular-expressions.info/quickstart.html

Edited February 25 by loukash
replaced *.mov with *.mp4

[Old Bruce]

Apropos Soft in soft hyphen

I really dislike that term, I much prefer the term Discretionary Hyphen. 

[MikeTO]

Thank you, I appreciate the tips on options to work around the automatic hyphenation of capitalized names.

19 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

• If you type a soft-hyphen at the start of the word, it will be invisible in the exported text and will prevent automatic hyphenation of that word. Text > Insert > Dashes and Hyphens > Soft Hyphen. Default keyboard shortcut on Windows is Ctrl+Shift+- (probably Cmd+Shift+- on Mac).
• Alternatively, you could define a Character Text Style with a hyphenation language of None and apply it to those words.

The soft or discretionary hyphen trick wouldn't have occurred to me but makes complete sense. Applying it or a character style (using the No Break attribute) thousands of times would be too tedious.

14 hours ago, loukash said:

To batch apply to the vast majority of possible matches, use a regular expression: 

But I hadn't thought of using grep so I'll give that a try, thank you. I'd rather apply a character style with No Break in it than insert a soft or discretionary hyphen so I'll try that approach.

[walt.farrell]

26 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I'd rather apply a character style with No Break in it than insert a soft or discretionary hyphen so I'll try that approach.

You can also apply character text styles via Find and Replace, though that is harder if any of the words have existing formatting via character text styles or local formatting (bold, italic, underline).

[loukash]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

if any of the words have existing formatting via character text styles or local formatting (bold, italic, underline

Exactly. That's why a soft hyphen is a more flexible solution.

[loukash]

15 minutes ago, Seneca said:

Capital Zone in particular?

That's for ALL CAPS.

[Seneca]

28 minutes ago, loukash said:

That's for ALL CAPS.

That's right. Didn't read the post correctly.

[MikeTO]

It's funny, there are other features I'd like such as cross references, multiple indices, and span columns, but a checkbox to turn off hyphenation for capitalized words is my #1 feature request. I'd pay for an upgrade just for this one feature.

The workarounds suggested are great and I'm using them but they're easy to forget.