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Correct hyphenation

Anonymous
2015-04-26T04:18:25+00:00

Hi everyone,

I'm posting about another issue I'm experiencing in the course of formatting my PhD thesis, which I have not had trouble with before, as far as I remember.

I'm using Word for Mac 2011 with a free student license. I only installed this a few months ago.

I noticed that Word doesn't seem to hyphenate correctly.

I have checked my language settings several times, the whole document is on English (Australia), but I get weird hyphenated words such as

alt-hough

vide-o

While I think the latter is technically correct, it simply looks off, and I wish I could control the hyphenation settings a bit more, like you can do in InDesign, for instance. 

Is there anything I can do, other than manual hyphenation? The document is 200+ pages, so I'd rather not go through all the hyphenated words.

Cheers

Julia

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-04-27T10:16:19+00:00

    When auto-hyphenation gives nasty results, try INCREASING the hyphenation zone in the dialog Phillip showed you.

    Word (on the Mac) uses a relatively simple algorithm to determine where to put the hyphen, but the more room you give it, the better choices it will make (and the wider the inter-word spacing will become).  The narrower your hyphenation zone, the less inter-word spacing you will get, and the weirder the hyphenation choices will be.

    So it's a balance.  Tweak the hyphenation zone width until you get a pleasing result.

    I never hyphenate anything, because it makes text difficult to read.  Research shows that skilled English readers read by the SHAPE of words and phrases.  In the same way as ALL CAPITALS destroys the shape of words, hyphenation (or the inter-word spacing that results) destroys the shape of phrases.

    You will slow you reader down (the more skilled they are, the more you will slow them down) and all that extra brain-processing that's going on to re-assemble the text destroys retentivity.

    So I don't do it :-)

    The typographical stunts that attract the eye to glossy coffee-table fashion magazines actually make their text (if they have any...) very difficult to read.  Not that busy academics spend 'much' time studying glossy coffee-table fashion magazines.  Or so they tell us...

    Bottom line is: if you want to type-set something, suck it into InDesign when you have completed the text.  If you get your styles right, InDesign will slurp it straight in, correctly formatted.

    Hope this helps

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-04-26T13:29:00+00:00

    I am not Language expert so I might get body-slammed by some of the MVP's on the groups. But, I believe there is no known official way of applying hyphenation to the word Video.  And If altogether is to be hyphenated, it should be as al-together.

    1. You can customize Hyphenation in the  Tools menu.
    2. Choose Hyphenation

    You can adjust in inches (CM, Pixels, etc)

    You can adjust limitation of consecutive hyphens.

    And you can Manually customize how words are Hyphenated. 3. Turn on hyphenation.(Automatically hyphenate Document)

    Also if you want to allow Hyphenation of Word in Capital letters click in checkbox. 4. Customize accordingly.

    _________

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    The questions, discussions, opinions, replies & answers I create, are solely mine and mine alone, and do not reflect upon my position as a Community Moderator.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-05-03T02:51:07+00:00

    Thanks John. I guess I'm used to it from German still. English speakers know German to have very long words, but the reality is that we just concatenate words, therefore it makes sense to always hyphenate. Thinking about your advice makes me realise why this would be less important in English now. 

    Seeing as I'm coming from a design background, I was going to put the thesis into InDesign but at the end of the day, I just can't be bothered with this massive document ;)

    I appreciate your help.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-04-26T22:11:05+00:00

    Thanks John

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  4. John Korchok 231.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2015-04-26T15:57:55+00:00

    In addition to checking Word's language settings, please check your System Preferences>Language and Region settings to ensure that English is first or only language listed.

    End-of-line hyphenation was invented to maximise text fill in justified columns, such as seen in newspapers. If your text is flush left and/or your page is formatted with one or two wide columns, hyphenation is not necessary or desirable. If you can't get it to hyphenate correctly, you may simply want to turn off the feature using Tools>Hyphenation and unchecking Automatically hyphenate document.

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