Spanish Hyphenation in InDesign

Question

I have a client I am putting together a Spanish publication for and am having a problem with the hyphenation in Spanish, the words get cut in the wrong place making this a grammar and spelling problem in the language. I asked the client if we could just remove all hyphenation in the document and they don't want to do that.

Example of hyphenation in Spanish:

Cartera = car-tera or carte-ra. This is the correct way you can separate the word

Cartera = ca-rtera or cart-era or carter-a. All these cuts are incorrect.

In Spanish it is incorrect to separate consonants from vowels like in my example but there are some cases in Spanish that are exceptions which have been pointed out to me.

I made sure the language settings were in Spanish, tried changing the hyphenation rules and even placing the text in a brand new layout with the Spanish language settings, making sure the dictionary was correct, but it still didn’t seem like things were changing for me.

I am placing a word document into InDesign, so could there be some settings carrying over to the InDesign document? Or is there something else I need to change or check to get the hyphenation working correctly?

I'm hoping to get some more info and would be appreciative of any feedback.

Jongware · Answer

Your language settings may have been overridden at a certain point during importing or formatting. Can you, by way of experiment, confirm the following:

1. You click you text cursor inside your Spanish text;

2. You select a word -- and the Character Panel confirms the applied language is, indeed, Spanish;

3. You choose "Edit > Spelling > Dictionary" and then you do not get the following –correct– result? (Your screen colors may vary.)

(You can type "cartera" in the word entry field and then press the "Hyphenate" button to see the possible hyphenation points.)

If at any point you see the language change from Spanish to something else, then there is something overriding your settings; and usually it's exactly that, a local override.

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