Cursor Glitch in Publisher

[Martyn Folkes]

I tried restarting, and turning off hardware acceleration. I've seen it before. It seems to only happen on lines with hyphenation:

 

 

 

[Martyn Folkes]

I have found the cause of the problem. I had Column End Zone in the Hyphenation settings set to 20mm. Setting it to 0 solved the problem.

However, as I understand it, the Column End Zone setting should only effect the last line in a column, but it seems to be having an effect on all hyphenated lines.

In the Help, it says "defines the amount of space allowed at the end of a column before hyphenation begins." and @MikeTO explains it this way: "Enter the hyphenation zone for the end of a column. It is recommended to avoid hyphenating the last word in a column so set this value larger than Hyphenation Zone and to at least the value of Paragraph End Zone. Set this value to a very large value to prevent the last word in a 
column from ever being hyphenated."

I'm sure everyone but me can understand this, but an explanation of Column End Zone (with pictures) would be appreciated.

 

 

[MikeTO]

11 hours ago, Martyn Folkes said:

I have found the cause of the problem. I had Column End Zone in the Hyphenation settings set to 20mm. Setting it to 0 solved the problem.

However, as I understand it, the Column End Zone setting should only effect the last line in a column, but it seems to be having an effect on all hyphenated lines.

In the Help, it says "defines the amount of space allowed at the end of a column before hyphenation begins." and @MikeTO explains it this way: "Enter the hyphenation zone for the end of a column. It is recommended to avoid hyphenating the last word in a column so set this value larger than Hyphenation Zone and to at least the value of Paragraph End Zone. Set this value to a very large value to prevent the last word in a 
column from ever being hyphenated."

Column end Zone does only affect the last line in a column. I tested it just now and it didn't affect any other paragraphs.

The hyphenation options are confusing and the Help system doesn't explain them. Upon re-reading my manual I think my explanations could have been clearer so here's an improved version.

• Paragraph end zone: Enter a value to override the paragraph’s Hyphenation Zone value for the last full line of the paragraph. Many users set this value to about 150% of Hyphenation Zone to avoid hyphenating short words at the end of a paragraph. To prevent the last word in a paragraph from being hyphenated regardless of length, set this value to the width of the column.
• Column end zone: Enter a value to override the paragraph’s Hyphenation Zone value for the last line of a column that is continued in another column. To avoid hyphenating the last word in a column, set this value to the width of the column. To allow longer words to be hyphenated at the end of a column, set this value to about 150% of Hyphenation Zone

I usually set Hyphenation Zone to 2p6 (about 0.4 inches or 11 mm), and both Paragraph End Zone and Column End Zone to 3p6 (about 0.6 inches or 15 mm), because I'm okay with hyphenating the last line in a column as long as it's not a very short word. But to avoid that entirely set column end zone to the width of the column.

The features work very well but usability could be improved if checkboxes were added for "Don't hyphenate last word in paragraph" and "Don't hyphenation last word in column". That would avoid users from having to figure this out too much.

[Martyn Folkes]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It all makes sense now and I know how it should work.

However, there is still the issue that with Column end zone set to anything other than zero, the caret/text cursor is not falling between letters, and is offset from where I click. This means that I can't take advantage of the Column end zone feature.

In this image, you can see the text cursor is in the middle of the "o" in the word "coconuts". But I clicked before the first "c" of "coconuts". If I type anything, it appears in the correct place, but the text cursor remains in the wrong position. It jumps to the correct position when I type three characters and there is no longer hyphenation on the line.

 

[MikeTO]

I missed your original report of the cursor issue while answering how the end zone settings work.

Yes, I'e seen that cursor glitch before. I think there were reports of it and it was fixed but you've found another combination. Just turning on column end zone with justified text will cause the cursor to be in the wrong position on a line with an auto hyphen.

I'll report this in the bugs forum because there's a crash related to this bug, too.

[MikeTO]