Hyphenation problems in Publisher 2

[DJP]

Setup:

1) Hyphenation is enabled (checked) in the Style that I am using for body text and the language is set to Auto (US English).
2) I have studied the help file on hyphenation and have kept the default settings since, if I understand correctly, they provide the most aggressive (so to speak) hyphenation.

But it's not working well.  I often get loose lines; see the screen shot.  In each place where I have inserted a red line, if I type a hyphen followed by a space, the preceding letters and the hyphen jump up to the previous line.  So there is certainly space available, but no automatic hyphenation happens.  Adding a soft hyphen at these points has no effect.  I would appreciate any advice!

[walt.farrell]

It would help if you would prepare a sample document where it doesn't work for you, and give us the .afpub file, @DJP.

[laurent32]

To have a beautiful text, you must play with…

But even more with…

I'm sure it could be what you missed ?

[DJP]

Thank you Laurent!  My hyphenation settings were exactly as shown in your first screen shot, but the maximum justification, which you have at 133%, was set to 816%!  (I am sure I never set it that way.)  Things are much better now that i have reduced it to 120%.

[Old Bruce]

@DJP,

Your example shows a short line length filled with longish words. This will cause problems which no automatic system will ever be able to fix. I would be tempted to put a line return in just before the word more (underlined in green). This will hopefully bump has down to take up the space.

You could also try messing about with Tracking. Select a line that is too tight and loosen the tracking, you'll get a hyphen or a line with a short word at the end will move down. Or select a line that is too loose and tighten the tracking causing a word below to become hyphenated.

A caveat is that if we then change the font family or font size we wind up with new problems caused by our "fixes" and new problems created by the change in the font family and or size.

[DJP]

Old Bruce, thanks for your reply.  See my reply above to Laurent.  I do know about tracking and other manual fixes, but I could not understand why, for instance, "connecting" would not hyphenate since there is plenty of room--and there were a great number of words that would have required manual adjustment.  Changing the maximum justification fixed this (mostly, and I can deal with the remaining few).

[Old Bruce]

3 minutes ago, DJP said:

could not understand why, for instance, "connecting" would not hyphenate

I am guessing you have applied a Character Style to it. Check that Character Style's Language setting for the Hyphenation setting.

[MikeTO]

You'll need to invest some time in finding the right hyphenation settings for your project. Every project is different, it depends on the language, the text size, the column width, justification settings, and personal preferences. Even the types of words used in the project will influence your choice of hyphenation settings.

Unfortunately, the hyphenation settings aren't well documented in the help system. Back in v1 I suggested the changes in red below. The changes weren't adopted but you might find these helpful, especially for the Minimum Score field which is a mystery field in the help system.

On 3/21/2021 at 4:33 PM, MikeTO said:

Could you please update the hyphenation help page to avoid confusion for new users? These three hyphenation control features are powerful but perhaps they could be explained a bit better.

• Minimum Score—the amount of extra space at the end of each line that is considered acceptable. If the amount of extra space exceeds this value, then auto-hyphenation will try to split words to reduce the excess. Try incrementing values upwards from 1 to experiment.
• Paragraph end zone—defines the amount of space allowed at the end of a paragraph before hyphenation begins.
• Column end zone—defines the amount of space allowed at the end of a column before hyphenation begins.

I recommend something like this:

• Minimum Score—impacts the amount of extra space at the end of each line that is considered acceptable. The score value must be from 0 to 10 in whole numbers where 0 has no impact and 10 will aggressively try to split words to reduce excess space at the end of each line. Values of 1 to 5 are considered typical.
• If the amount of extra space exceeds this value, then auto-hyphenation will try to split words to reduce the excess. Try incrementing values upwards from 1 to experiment.
• Paragraph end zone—defines the amount of space allowed at the end of a paragraph before hyphenation begins. To avoid hyphenating the last word in a paragraph, enter a value such as 1 in or 25 mm.
• Column end zone—defines the amount of space allowed at the end of a column before hyphenation begins. To avoid hyphenating the last word in a column, enter a value such as 1 in or 25 mm.

Thanks!

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, DJP said:

I do know about tracking and other manual fixes, but I could not understand why, for instance, "connecting" would not hyphenate since there is plenty of room

As I suggested before, having a sample document from you would help us provide better answers. It helps eliminate guessing.

[DJP]

On 1/8/2023 at 3:10 PM, Old Bruce said:

I am guessing you have applied a Character Style to it.

 

I have a paragraph style "Body text" whose spelling language is set to US English; hyphenation is Auto, which I assume picks up the hyphenation data from the specified language.  The word "connected" has a character style for italic text (based on the Body text paragraph style); the italic style has "No change" for language and hyphenation.  This looks correct to me, but if I have to specify language and hyphenation manually please let me know.

[MikeTO]

Hi DJP, could you please share a sample document? Just copy one paragraph into a text frame of the same width in a new document and then share that here for testing. We can review the settings and offer advice.

Cheers