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Automatic hyphenation hyphenates long words at the end of lines. This ensures that the right margin of the text does not appear too "frayed".

Hyphenation works fully automatically as you type. Thus, you usually do not have to concern yourself with it at all.

All you have to do is make sure that you have set the correct language because hyphenation will naturally produce incorrect results if, for example, you have an English text separated according to German hyphenation rules.

Setting the language

Detailed instructions on setting the language for spell check and hyphenation were provided at the start of this chapter. For more information, see Setting the language.

Here's a brief summary:

▪Setting the default language

▪Formatting sections of text in another language

Setting the hyphenation frequency

If desired, you can specify how often you want the hyphenation function to separate words – or disable hyphenation completely. This setting can be set separately for each paragraph.

To do so, select the relevant paragraphs and open the dialog box by clicking on the group arrow in the bottom right corner of the ribbon tab Home | group Paragraph. Switch to the Text flow tab. Then select the desired setting in the dropdown list Hyphenation.

Tip: Alternatively, you can find these settings on the ribbon tab Review | Hyphenation .

The following options are available:

If you select None, you completely 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 TextMaker to attempt hyphenation only in every second or third line.

Completely disabling hyphenation for a document

Apart from the aforementioned options, you can completely enable or disable hyphenation for the current document.

On the ribbon tab Review | Hyphenation , choose the command Automatic hyphenation from the dropdown menu to switch the mode.

Automatic hyphenation is enabled by default. This is evident from the check mark that is displayed before the command Automatic hyphenation. To disable the hyphenation, choose this command and the check mark will disappear. Automatic hyphenation is now completely disabled (for the current document). Hyphens will no longer be inserted automatically and the existing ones will be removed.

If you choose this command once more, automatic hyphenation will be enabled again.

By the way, the same option is also available in the Settings, Language tab. If you enable or disable the option Use automatic hyphenation for this document there, it is identical to choosing the command Review | Hyphenation  | Automatic hyphenation.

Note: This setting is a document option. This means that it affects only the current document and its state is saved in the document. Thus, you can decide whether or not automatic hyphenation should be performed for each individual document.

Tip: If you want to save the currently selected state of the hyphenation (on/off) as a global setting for future documents, use the Set as default button in the Settings, Language tab.

Disabling hyphenation for a word or a section of text

You can also disable hyphenation for a specific section of text, for example, a certain word.

Select the section of text and use the Change language button (ribbon tab Review | group Spelling) to set the setting No language.

Note: Please note that this will also disable the spell check in the selected section of text.

Inserting "soft hyphens"

TextMaker 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+Hyphen. From now on, TextMaker 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).

Tip: Soft hyphens are not displayed in the document by default. However, you can make them visible at any time by choosing the ribbon command File | Options, switching to the View tab and enabling the option Soft hyphens. This will display all soft hyphens as hyphens with a gray background.

Inserting "non-breaking" hyphens

If a word (or a number) that contains a hyphen is located at the end of a line, TextMaker 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 not distributed over two lines, but is instead moved completely to the next line.

If you want to prevent TextMaker 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.