Publisher all versions - hyphenation bug

[cgidesign]

EDIT:

See later posts - there is a general bug with hyphenation.

------------

Text frame in Pub filled with text. No automatic hyphenation active.

I like to hyphenate manually.

Example:
 

Text text text Digitalisierung.

text text text.

I like to get:
 

Quote

 

Text text text Digi-

talisierung text text text.

 

But not as a hard break. I like to get a manual hypenation that automatically disappears if the word is not at the end of the line anymore.

Example:
 

Quote

 

Much more text text text

Digitalisierung text text text.

 

 

[MikeTO]

Position the cursor where you want to add a conditional hyphen and choose Text > Insert > Dashes and Hyphens > Soft Hyphen.

[Old Bruce]

Discretionary hyphens could work for you. They are called "soft hyphens" and on Mac they are entered by using Command + - (dash/minus sign). Look in the Text > Insert > Dashes and Hyphens menu.

[cgidesign]

I am aware of the soft hyphens but they don't trigger a hyphenation.

It is always the whole word that jumps to the next / previous line regardless of whether there is a soft hyphen in the word or not.

[Old Bruce]

@cgidesign, could you include a small publisher document showing how this doesn't work for you. It works here for me on Mac OS 12.7.6 with Publisher 2.5.5

[MikeTO]

If a word has a soft hyphen in it but won't break, check that you don't have No Break applied to that word. If that's turned off then it should always break at the soft hyphen even with auto hyphenated turned off.

[cgidesign]

Test document attached.

Either I am blind and missing a setting or it just doesn't work.

EDIT:

I found the cause. There is some strange behaviour if the letter justification is not set to zero.

 

Another example:

 

 

softhyphen-test.afpub

[cgidesign]

I now tried with old Indesign CS6. There it works as expected. I really like to use Publisher but this issue hinders me at the moment.

Let me know if there are any tricks I am missing.

[MikeTO]

The test document you uploaded has a hard hyphen in it.

But you're right, there is a bug with hyphenation and letter spacing. I'm going to file a bug report in the bugs forum for it. This is bigger than soft hyphens, it affects automatic hyphenation, too. I think you've found something that if fixed might help a lot of people.

[MikeTO]

Here's the bug report. In a nutshell, hyphenation (auto and soft) doesn't work properly with non-zero minimum and maximum letter spacing values.

 

[cgidesign]

3 hours ago, MikeTO said:

The test document you uploaded has a hard hyphen in it.

Yes, that was one of the many tests I made.

It is so frustrating with Affinity. Whenever I like to use it for a serious job, there is a blocking bug and I need to switch back to my 15 years old CS6.

By the way, it is also broken in the V 2.4.x

[MikeTO]

It will work correctly if you change letter spacing to 0/0/0. That may not be what you want but it's the only setting at which justified text will hyphenate correctly. I recommend not setting letter spacing to anything else if you need to use justification.

[cgidesign]

Thanks @MikeTO but 0/0/0 is not an option in my case because I need to fine tune the layout for a company brochure. Justification alone is not "good enough" is must be "good looking justification" 🙂

[MikeTO]

6 hours ago, cgidesign said:

Thanks @MikeTO but 0/0/0 is not an option in my case because I need to fine tune the layout for a company brochure. Justification alone is not "good enough" is must be "good looking justification" 🙂

If you choose to use Affinity for your project then your choice for now would be between 0/0/0 letter spacing or infrequent hyphenation. Both will lead to less optimized spacing but only you can decide which is worse. But at least with 0/0/0 your soft hyphens would work.