Hyphenating before an Em Dash

[vwatson]

How can I exclude the em dash as an acceptable character to include in hyphenation in Publisher?

For example, if I had a sentence like this.

Crocodiles, alligators—they both look the same to me 

It seems to assume "alligators—they" is all one word. I've had it insert a  hyphenation dash right before the em dash, which looks rather ugly. 

[MrDavidW]

That is the correct way to use an em dash. Very rarely would you use spacing before or after. It is not a hyphen and it is not "joining" those two words.
Alternatively, use space, en dash, space.
Check out en dash and em dash rules on Wikipedia or a grammar/punctuation website.
 

Edited July 4, 2019 by MrDavidW
More information

[kenmcd]

I went looking to see what the Unicode standard says about a line break there.
Unicode® Standard Annex #14
Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm
https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/

Perhaps your em dash above should be a en dash – which would break.

But you mentioned adding a hyphen which does not make sense at all to me.

[vwatson]

Okay, maybe I didn't explain it well enough.

If I have something like this

alligators—they

and it happens to fall where Publisher thinks it should hyphenate, it does this, breaking it at the em dash.

alligators-

—they

Publisher is inserting the hyphen, not me. It adds a hyphen before the em dash.

I've always inserted em dashes without spaces before or after. Perhaps you can use spaces on either side of an em dash?

[Fixx]

3 hours ago, vwatson said:

I've always inserted em dashes without spaces before or after. Perhaps you can use spaces on either side of an em dash?

em dash is american thing so I do not know it well.. but you are not opposed to use spaces with it. Possibly thin spaces would do.

That hyphenation thing is something devs should correct. Meanwhile I would just finish the design and search then all occurrences and fix manually. Or search-replace em-dash with thin-space-em-dash-thin space.

Edit: Thin space as all similar are non-breaking, so no cigar. But zero-width-space works!

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Fixx said:

em dash is american thing so I do not know it well..

English (all varieties), not specifically American

Good idea to use a zero-width-space, Fixx!

And yes, adding the hyphen seesm like a hyphenation bug, to me.

@vwatson: You should create a new bug report topic in the appropriate subforum (Mac, Windows) of Report a Bug in Affinity Publisher to ensure that Serif knows about it and gets it logged with the developers.

Also, yes, you can use a space around an em-dash if you want, but depending on which style guide you believe in, it may be incorrect to do so   

[vwatson]

Thanks everyone. I'll add it in the bug section.