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Wrong code point interpretation in Word for Alt 0173 (00AD)

Anonymous
2020-03-16T08:34:40+00:00

With reference to  http://www.fileformat.info/

Unicode defines the following special character as soft hyphen (discretionary hyphen) 00AD:

Shortcut Alt 0173.

In Word typing Alt+0173 or converting 00AD creates a hyphen similar to 002D (hyphen minus) and not the discretionary hyphen. Typing the same in PowerPoint this works as expected: I get the discretionary hyphen.

Using Insert > Symbols you may insert the discretionary hyphen in Word but this hyphen obviously is not represented internally by the correct Unicode code point. 

Since discretionary hyphens are becoming more and more important due to the requirements of a responsive design, I would like to see this error corrected in Word, or am I misunderstanding something? In addition, copying and pasting between different applications (Microsoft and e.g. Adobe) can lead to incorrect hyphen conversions.

Regards Dieter

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-03-16T10:05:34+00:00

    Hi Dieter,

    Thanks for sharing your experience on this forum.

    Per your description, it seems that there is an issue when you type soft hyphen in word.

    First, soft hyphen is a generally invisible text character, then I did a test on my side, there is test result:

    1.When I typed 00AD and 002D code in word:

     

    It shows that even though soft has different displey hyphen with hyphen-Minus but it’s visible

    2.When I typed 00AD and 002D code in Excel:

     

    But when I click the 00AD cell, soft hyphen is disappeared:

     

    3.When I typed 00AD and 002D code in PowerPoint:

     

    Soft hyphen is  only invisible in PowerPoint.

    Therefore, this test shows that we got the same result with you. It seems that there are different results when you insert soft hyphen in different Office application according to needs.

    If you have further concern about this feature, we would like to recommend that you can share your experience via sending a frown in the feedback channel, so the related developer will take a look into this.

    How do I give feedback on Microsoft Office?

    Appreciate your understanding.

    Best Regards.

    Higgins

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-03-17T03:28:48+00:00

    Hi Dieter,

    Thanks for your quick reply.

    As there is a confusion scenario when using a hyphen in Office product, and you have feedback your concern to our development team, our development team will be more focused on how hyphen worked in office products and how to improve it according to different needs in future releases.

    Thank you very much for your support for office products, if you have any other questions when using Office 365 products, welcome to post a new thread in our forum, we are always here and glad to help you.

    Have a nice day.

    Best Regards,

    Higgins

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-03-16T10:36:01+00:00

    Hi Higgins,

    yes the discretionary hyphen must be invisible (except you have an option like in Word to make control characters/special characters visible).

    As modern software shall support Unicode, also the discretionary hyphen shall be supported correctly and this means to support the correct code point 00AD and not to make this code point visible as a standard (or even special) hyphen glyph.

    As far as I understand we don't have different needs for soft hyphen (as the use case is clearly defined). We might have the need for different fallback strategies if a certain environment/process does not support the official code point of the discretionary hyphen.

    I fear I have identified in Office products a really old legacy issue from the time we had no Unicode support.

    Yes I just have given feedback via the official feedback channel and hope this bug (for me it's a bug) will be corrected.

    Thanks for your hint on the feedback channel.

    Best regards back Dieter

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