Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Preventing a compound word from breaking at the hyphen

Amy wrote and asked:

Is there a way to set InDesign to keep "ACME-PRO" together and not insert a line break after the hyphen?

There are at least two ways to accomplish this:

1. Type ACME-PRO with a discretionary hyphen at the beginning (immediately before the A). A discretionary hyphen is typed as command-shift-hyphen (Mac) or ctrl-shift-hyphen (Windows). Then replace the hyphen between the E and P with a non-breaking hyphen, typed as command-option-hyphen (Mac) or ctrl-alt-hyphen (Windows).

or

2. Select ACME-PRO and format it with the "No Break" character attribute, located in the Control panel menu.

Method number one is preferable, since it is visible, permanent, and it doesn't create a character or paragraph style override.

Either of these solutions could be applied throughout a document quickly with Edit > Find/Change.

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