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

[Helge Skogh]

Affinity Publisher does not support hyphenation for every language. I use Adobe InDesign which is superb and utterly elegant regarding typography. Affinity Publisher is for beginners.

[Oufti]

3 hours ago, Helge Skogh said:

Affinity Publisher does not support hyphenation for every language.

Please have a look there:

https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Text/hyphenationInstalling.html?title=Installing hyphenation dictionaries

And possibly here also:

 

[Iztok]

OSX  Publisher 2.4.2. hyphenation in Slovene doesn't work, if I in Paragraph palette check auto hyphenate it work, does work in Slowene langage or some default setting

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, Iztok said:

hyphenation in Slovene doesn't work, if I in Paragraph palette check auto hyphenate it work, does work in Slowene langage or some default setting

Can you please explain a bit more. First you say it doesn't work, then you say it does if you choose automatic hyphenation in the Paragraph panel. It certainly would not work with automatic hyphenation turned off.

I also don't understand "does work in Slowene language", so, is it working or not?

It looks like it is hyphenating in your second screenshot. Is it just a question of how good a job it does?

[MikeTO]

The problem is either that you haven't selected Auto Hyphenation, as Walt asked, or that you haven't properly installed the hyphenation dictionary.

Did you install the Slovakian hyphenation dictionary as shown below? Note that the hyphenation dictionary must be in a folder named sk_SK while the two spelling dictionary files must not be in the folder. You must restart Affinity after installing a dictionary.

[anto]

I also have problems with hyphenation.
Dictionaries from LibreOffice or OpenOffice do not work well in Publisher. If you use them, they leave large gaps between words and you have to break some words into syllables manually.
I did an experiment and used the dictionary from Indesign to the same text. (For clarity, I installed the LibreOffice dictionary for 2.4.2 and the Indesign dictionary for the beta version, and opened the same document.) The Indesign dictionary did a much better job, even though the settings were the same.
So what was the problem? Is it the dictionary or Publisher's incorrect use of it?

[walt.farrell]

33 minutes ago, anto said:

So what was the problem? Is it the dictionary or Publisher's incorrect use of it?

If you used Publisher in both cases, it sounds like a dictionary problem.

[kenmcd]

2 hours ago, anto said:

I did an experiment and used the dictionary from Indesign to the same text. (For clarity, I installed the LibreOffice dictionary for 2.4.2 and the Indesign dictionary for the beta version, and opened the same document.) The Indesign dictionary did a much better job, even though the settings were the same.
So what was the problem? Is it the dictionary or Publisher's incorrect use of it?

Are the two hyphenation dictionaries the same?
Did you compare them?
Sounds like the ID version has been improved.

 

[anto]

5 hours ago, kenmcd said:

Are the two hyphenation dictionaries the same?
Did you compare them?

Yes, they are different. 20 kb vs 67 kb. But as @DJP has shown in the screenshot above, if you insert the hyphen manually in LibreOffice dictionary, it will work and be set. So, it turns out that Publisher does not work correctly with dictionaries, because the dictionary has this hyphenation.

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, anto said:

But as @DJP has shown in the screenshot above, if you insert the hyphen manually in LibreOffice dictionary, it will work and be set. So, it turns out that Publisher does not work correctly with dictionaries, because the dictionary has this hyphenation.

I don't think that's a correct conclusion. It just shows that when you manually insert a hyphen Publisher will use it in its justification. It doesn't say anything about what the dictionary contains. You would have to look inside the dictionary to know that.

[Alfred]

15 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Did you install the Slovakian hyphenation dictionary as shown below? Note that the hyphenation dictionary must be in a folder named sk_SK while the two spelling dictionary files must not be in the folder.

Just to avoid any confusion in further discussion of the issue, @Iztok is trying to use hyphenation in Slovenian (sl_SI), not Slovakian (sk_SK).

[Gouveia]

17 hours ago, kenmcd said:

Os dois dicionários de hifenização são iguais?
Você os comparou?
Parece que a versão do ID foi melhorada.

 

Como se pode instalar dois dicionários? Eu queria um com o pré-acordo ortográfico da lingua portuguesa no In Design ele assume o que tenho para o o Word.

 

[Gouveia]

Não sei se o Affinity tem esta ferramenta, que mostra os "rios" entre palavras. 

As minhas desculpas, mas só sei português.