Hyphenation

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Hyphenation

If you want long words to be automatically hyphenated at the end of a line, you can always enable automatic hyphenation.

The hyphenation can be enabled or disabled separately for each paragraph of your document.

Note: Note that hyphenation is disabled by default for all paragraphs in a document. You must thus explicitly enable them if required.

Hyphenation works completely automatically in the background as you type.

Important: Of course, hyphenation only provides correct results if you have set the correct language in the program settings. To set the language, choose the command File | Options options_icon, switch to the Language tab and select the language from the dropdown list Default language.

Enabling hyphenation and setting the hyphenation frequency

By default, hyphenation is disabled for all paragraphs of the document. To enable it, proceed as follows:

1.Place the text cursor in the desired paragraph (or select several paragraphs).
2.On the ribbon tab Home | group Paragraph, use the group arrowgroup_arrow in the bottom right corner to open the dialog box.
Alternatively: Right-click to open the context menu and select the entry Paragraph.
3.Select the desired option in the dropdown list Hyphenation.

The following options are available:

Option

Explanation

None

Hyphenation is not performed in this paragraph. This is the default setting.

Always

Any amount of consecutive hyphenation is attempted.

Every 2 lines

Hyphenation is attempted only in every second line.

Every 3 lines

Hyphenation is attempted only in every third line.

If you select None, you disable hyphenation for the selected paragraphs, whereas if you select Always, the program tries to hyphenate any line of a paragraph.

When do you use the other two options? It is not always a good idea to hyphenate at every point possible. For text in narrow columns, for example, this may lead to words being split at the end of almost every line and thus to a reduction in the document's legibility. Thus, you may want to use the option Every 2 lines or Every 3 lines to instruct Presentations to attempt hyphenation only in every second or third line.

Inserting "soft hyphens"

Presentations has a very sophisticated hyphenation module that only very rarely makes mistakes. If the program does not hyphenate a word in the desired place, you can always correct it by inserting a soft hyphen (also known as an optional hyphen).

To do so, place the text cursor at the point where you want the word to be hyphenated and press the key combination Ctrl+Minus (minus sign). From now on, Presentations will only hyphenate the word at this point.

If a word contains multiple syllables, you can also insert several soft hyphens (for example, one after each syllable).

Inserting "non-breaking" hyphens

If a word (or a number) that contains a hyphen is located at the end of a line, Presentations may use this hyphen to hyphenate the word. In certain cases, this is not desirable.

In the case of a phone number like 936386-0, for example, you do not want the zero to be separated from the rest of the phone number by hyphenation. The number is ultimately easier to read if it is moved completely to the next line rather than distributed over two lines.

If you want to prevent Presentations from performing hyphenation at a hyphen that a word contains, insert a non-breaking hyphen instead of a regular hyphen. You can insert this by pressing the key combination Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen.

You could also call this character a "non-separating hyphen" because it looks like a normal hyphen but prevents hyphenation from being performed at this point.