Last week's newsletter explained how to use a zero-width nonbreaking space to keep a word from breaking at the end of a line when hyphenation is turned on (Tools > Language > Hyphenation > Automatically hyphenate document). Fine as far as it goes. But what can you do to break a word at a place other than one Microsoft Word insists on using? For example, Word will happily break "convertible" as "converti-ble." Ugh. (See your favorite style manual for more information about how to break words properly; I prefer The Chicago Manual of Style.)

The solution is to insert an optional hyphen at any acceptable breaking points. In "convertible," for example, you could insert optional hyphens as follows: con-vert-ible. The optional hyphens will override word's automatic hyphenation and break the word at one of the points you've specified.

To get an optional hyphen, click Insert > Symbol > Special Characters > Optional hyphen. Or, easier yet, press CTRL + - (on a Macintosh press COMMAND + -).

In our shop, proofreaders check galleys for bad breaks, which are then corrected manually by our typesetters, who insert optional hyphens as needed (although usually in QuarkXPress rather than Word). Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to insert optional hyphens automatically? As it turns out, there is--even in Microsoft Word.

Stay tuned; next week I'll tell you all about it.

You can learn more about The Chicago Manual of Style here:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12245.ctl

And you can see the FAQ here:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

After reading last week's article about how to use a zero-width nonbreaking space to keep a word from breaking, Patsy Price sent a tip about an elegant alternative:

I too have been very frustrated when specific words insisted on breaking in Word 98 (Mac) whether I wanted them to or not. I tried everything I could think of, including inserting a nonbreaking hyphen before the word, but nothing worked. Then somebody on one of the lists I belong to made a suggestion that has worked for me so far: select the word and change the language to No Proofing [Tools > Language > Do not check spelling or grammar]. Even when the file is opened in Word 2000 PC the word doesn't hyphenate.

Patsy made the effort to track down the person who originally made the suggestion, H?l?ne Dion on the McEdit list. So thanks to H?l?ne for the tip and to Patsy for passing it on.

Bill Rubidge (wbr@aya.yale.edu) sent the following tip on how to make a zero-width nonbreaking hyphen in Word 97, along with a brilliant wildcard find-and-replace routine to keep words together at the end of a paragraph.

Interesting zero-width action. In my case I wanted to break long URLs in a narrow text column. Unfortunately, I am still using Word 97, so I had to resort to a conditional hyphen solution, but I set the hyphen size to 1 point and colored it white to hide it.

In any case, my experience on that issue and your description of the one below made me think you could take your "Don't break that word" solution a step further. I never use hyphenation, so I don't have your issue, but I dislike short words ending up all by their lonesome as the final line of a paragraph. My solution is:

Search for:

([A-Za-z0-9,.$?;:'"")!*]{1,8}) ([A-Za-z0-9,.$?;:'"")!*]{1,8})[^013]

Replace with:

1^s2

This forces the last two words (up to eight characters long) to be on the last line together.

Your hyphenation problem seems similar, but I shudder at the thought of inserting the Unicode characters manually. Would it do the job for you to search for the end of a paragraph and then insert the nonbreaking zero-width space character between EVERY letter of the last word? This way, you could run this macro automatically for the whole document.

By the way, I found I had to do an additional undo search to take out these things where I knew that the item was part of a small column. For example, if the found item was in a table, I would undo the nonbreaking material, as the table columns might be too narrow for this to be appropriate.

Thanks to Bill for the great tips.

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RESOURCES

Possibly the ultimate treatise on the subject, the fascinating book Hyphenation, by Ronald McIntosh and David Fawthrop, is available free online:

http://www.hyphenologist.co.uk/book/BOOK-ED3.HTM

I've recently been editing a long, scholarly tome that, for reasons I'll discuss in a future newsletter, my co-workers and I decided to typeset in Microsoft Word, following the techniques explained here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708956278

Our intrepid typesetter has been fairly content except for one thing: there seems to be no way to keep a word from breaking at the end of a line. Microsoft Word happily breaks "Je-sus" and "Bud-dha," for example, which we'd like to avoid. We could force a word down with a soft return, but that doesn't seem like a very elegant solution. Clever idea: how about putting an optional hyphen (CTRL + -) at the *beginning* of the word? That works, but it also *displays* a hyphen at the beginning of the word, which certainly won't do. Can the optional hyphen go at the end of the word? No, that doesn't work at all. So where might we find an answer?

Well, Unicode fonts include all kinds of interesting things. Would they, by chance, include a zero-width nonbreaking space? If we had one of those, we could insert it at the spot where we didn't want a break to occur. I went to Alan Wood's spectacular Unicode Resources site and searched for "zero-width nonbreaking space":

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/search.html

There it was, not under general punctuation but as the last entry under Arabic Presentation Forms, of all things:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/arabic_presentation_forms_b.html

The Web site told me the decimal number (65279) and hex number (FEFF) of the character, so I fired up Word 2002 (XP) and entered the character by typing the hex number followed by ALT + x. With nonprinting characters showing, I could see the little beauty--it looked like a gray box inside a gray box. When nonprinting characters *weren't* showing, the character was invisible, since it had no width. And sure enough, when I put the character into a word and then pushed that word to the end of the line, the word refused to break. Success!

I sent a sample to Word guru Steve Hudson, who tested the idea in various ways and pronounced it good. Thanks, Steve! So now I share this little marvel with you. If you'd like to see the character in action (and get a sample of the character that you can copy and use in your own documents), you can download the following document to play around with:

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/nonbreaking.zip

After you download, unzip, and open the document, notice the automatically hyphenated "excellent" on the first line. Now add a character somewhere in the middle of the *second* line--enough to make the second "excellent" break. But it won't!

Incidentally, the character works in Word 2000 and later versions as long as you have Unicode fonts installed on your computer. You can learn more here:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html

Please note that using this character within a word will mess up spell-checking for that word, so you might want to check spelling *before* inserting the character hither and yon. If you need to get rid of the characters, display nonprinting characters; then search for ^u65279 and replace with nothing.

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READERS WRITE

After reading last week's article on finding and replacing weird WordPerfect characters, Jane Lyle (jlyle@indiana.edu), managing editor at Indiana University Press, sent the following macro. Thanks, Jane! The macro does its work by searching for characters formatted in the WP TypographicSymbols font, and it includes some characters that last week's macro overlooked. If you don't know how to use such macros, you can find out here.

'MACRO BEGINS HERE

' WPTyp Macro

' Macro recorded 10/25/2001 by Jane Lyle

'
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = ""

.Replacement.Text = ""

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = False

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = "A"

.Replacement.Text = """"

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = "@"

.Replacement.Text = """"

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = ">"

.Replacement.Text = "'"

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = "="

.Replacement.Text = "'"

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = "B"

.Replacement.Text = "^="

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = "C"

.Replacement.Text = "^+"

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = "?"

.Replacement.Text = """"

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Replacement.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"

.Font.Name = "WP TypographicSymbols"

.Text = "Y"

.Replacement.Text = ". . ."

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

End With

Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

'MACRO ENDS HERE

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RESOURCES

You can find lots of interesting spaces, hyphens, and other Unicode characters here:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/general_punctuation.html