Prevent Hyphenation of Proper Nouns

[Peachy]

Hi everybody,

how can I protect a term from being split when automatic hyphenation is enabled? Excample: AN/FPS‑115.
I'm working with Publisher 2.6.2 on WIN 11.
In the previous version, there used to be a 'Hyphenation Exceptions' menu. I can’t seem to find a similar feature in the current version.
Thanks for help.

[MikeTO]

Hi Peachy, there has never been a hyphenation exceptions feature in Affinity. It's something a lot of us have requested.

There also isn't a feature to prevent hyphenation of capitalized words such as proper nouns. The best solution for now is to create a character style with Character > Position & Transform > No Break selected and apply it to all of your proper nouns. The challenge with doing so is you might accidentally type more text in that character style since it won't be obvious - you could consider making it highlighted so you know where it's applied until just before you export.

I have thousands of proper nouns in one of my books and it's too much of a hassle to deal with so I plan to just correct bad hyphenation as a final proofing step instead of applying a style to all of them.

Good luck

[walt.farrell]

10 hours ago, MikeTO said:

There also isn't a feature to prevent hyphenation of capitalized words such as proper nouns.

You can insert a soft-hyphen at the front of a word to tell Publisher not to hyphenate it further, and to treat it as No Break unless the frame becomes so narrow that there is no other choice. This works for AN/FPS-115 on my iPad in a test I just did. 

Interestingly, when I copy and paste the AN/FPS‑115 from the first post into my Publisher document it won't hyphenate either, unless I erase the - and retype it. So there may be another solution, perhaps a non-breaking hyphen?

[MikeTO]

I always forget to suggest the soft hyphen trick.

I also can't get AN/FPS‑115 to break in English or German. Maybe just a poor example?

[Peachy]

Thank you for the tips. I occasionally work with InDesign at my company, so I may have saved something incorrectly there.

I tested the non-breaking hyphen. At first it didn’t work, but after some more trial and error, it finally did. I guess you don’t have to understand everything.
It’s a bit disappointing that a word processing program doesn’t offer such a feature.

I’m working on an academic text that’s full of these kinds of designations — this is going to be interesting...

Thanks again to both of you!