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Typography Tip #2.

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Typography Tip #2. When justifying text in Microsoft Word use the hyphenation feature to improve the look of your page. Notice in the text block on the left, there is a lot of unnecessary “white space” distributed throughout. When hyphenation is turned on the overall typographic color of the page is much more even. To enable this feature in Microsoft Word do the following: After you have justified the columns in your document, choose from the “Tools menu” > Language > then from the dropdown menu, choose hyphenation, then choose “Automatically hyphenate document”

 

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2005
    What are your views on not right justifying text in the first place?
  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2005
    Do you know if there are any plans in Office 12 to support hypenation/punctuation that hangs outside the margin? It's such a pretty thing to look at, and as far as I can tell Word doesn't support it.

    Neil
  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2005
    Could you comment on the decision to disable by default in Word those typographic no-brainers like hyphenation and kerning?
  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2005
    What's the difference in setting hyphenation on from setting the option "Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows" (http://office-watch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v6-n40)?
  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2005
    I feel that hyphenation setting should be part of the paragraph style definition.
  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2005
    Thanks for all the comments, I will try to answer as best I can in one post. Our job is to encourage all of the application teams here at Microsoft to enable best practices for typographic layout, and there are often competing demands for new features, so this does not happen as fast as we would like. The Hanging punctuation feature is something we would love to see Word support, as well as more sophisticated Kerning and OpenType Layout features. There has already been quite a bit of work done here at Microsoft to improve the Paragraph layout including hanging punctuation support, however this has not been adopted by Word just yet.
    We of course continue to encourage these new features. It would also be great to get more direct feedback from customers in this regard also. We will forward the comments so far to the appropriate teams at Microsoft. This link may be useful for more direct feedback if anyone who has posted so far is interested.
    http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus.aspx
    this link may also be of interest
    http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.ProductFeedback
    Stephen - My understanding on Kerning not being on by default, is that this was historically a performance issue.
    Danny - With regard to making the document design features more automatic, or easier to find, the next Version of Word has a completely new UI which is designed to do exactly that, although I am unsure if Hyphenation is something that is made more obvious.
    Nathan - Hyphenating a word at a syllable is ok. If the hyphenated word break happens over a page turn, in other words if the last word on a page is hyphenated, this should be avoided if possible.
    Greg - I will have to further investigate the WordPerfect pointer to fully understand the issue, and will post something on this at a future date

    mike
  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2005
    In the text sample above, it might be even nicer to apply hyphenation to the word "patterns" only:

    Imagine that you have before you a
    flagon of wine. You may choose your
    own favorite vintage for this imaginary
    demonastration, so that it be a deep
    shimmering crimson in color. You have
    two goblets before you. One is of solid
    gold, wrought in the most exquisite pat-
    terns. The other is crystal-clear glass,
    thin as a bubble, and as transparent.
    Pour and drink; and according to your
    choice of goblet, I shall know whether
    or not you are a connoisseur of wine.
  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2005
    Can't wait for #3.
    Great blog too.
  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 26, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 27, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2006
    Do you still use Knuth-Liang hyphenation? I know that Frank Liang worked on the hyphenation engine in Word back in the day but...
  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2006
    Instead of compaining here, which is ineffective, please find a constructive way to solve your problem.

    For example, download the Office 2007 Beta and test your use cases.  If you find bugs, then report them.