FM breaking words at line's end without wrapping.

[TCBill]

Hello. I have a document in which FM is not wrapping words at the end of lines:

Note that the first line has broken the word "Transfer" in two, without a hyphen, when it should have wrapped that entire word to the next line. It is also breaking cross-references; see line 2.

I have played around with the pagination and hyphenation options to no avail. Chanig the line alignment is no help either; the sentence as shown above is "justified" but the same thing happens when I set it to "left." Setting the alignment to "centered" has a very comical looking result, but the topmost line is still broken mid-word.

What am I missing here?

Thanks in advance,

Bill

[frameexpert]

Are you getting any missing font messages when you open the document? Try making a PDF to see if the line breaks are correct there.

[TCBill]

No missing font messages upon opening either the book or the document. Also, the problem is still there in the PDF.

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

Looks strange. What paragraph language is set in the Paragraph Designer?

Best regards

Winfried

[TCBill]

The language is set to US English

[Winfried Reng]

OK. That's good. When set to none, FrameMaker would not know, how to hyphenate properly.

Still something like your hyphenation should not happen.

Can you do a MIF wash? Save as MIF and then back to FM again.

What's your FrameMaker version in Help | About? The current version is 17.0.3.

Which font do you use? I think that I noticed something like your issue with an Asian font.

Best regards, Winfried

[TCBill]

The MIF wash didn't have any effect.

FM version: 17.0.3

The font is boring ol' Arial.

[Barb Binder]

A few more questions for you...

• No chance there is a space in the middle of those two words, right? Is there anything in between the two parts? What happens when you click in front of the n in transfer and press backspace once? Does the a disappear?
• What are your Paragraph Designer > Advanced > Word Spacing values? Actually, could you just share a screen shot of Advanced properties so that we can see the hyphenation and word spacing settings?

~Barb

[TCBill]

Hi Barb,

In answer to your first question, the a does disappear when I backspace over it.

As to the second question, here's the screen scrape:

 Thanks a million!

Bill

[Barb Binder]

This is an odd one. Are you comfortable sharing your file with me? You can put it on a cloud server like dropbox and put the link here (public) or you could click my name above this reply and message it to me directly. I am very happy to take a look at it.

~Barb

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

Wow, Bill! This was a tricky one to solve!  🤯

You can designate characters that are allowed to appear at the end of a line in Format > Document > Text Options > Allow  Line Breaks After. As a default, FrameMaker defines a forward slash, a hyphen, an en dash and an em dash, meaning that it's OK to end a line with one of those four characters.

Somehow the letter a was added to the list, allowing FrameMaker to break after an a!

This is a document level command, so if this is going on in more than one of your files, you can just go to File > Import > Formats and import Document Properties from a corrected file to the other files in your book. Happy weekend! 😊

~Barb

[TCBill]

Wow.  Just wow.   

As someone once said, "With great power comes great responsibility," and that's certainly true with Framemaker. It has a lot of powerful-but-arcane features, and it is our responsibility to use them wisely. I inherited this project from a person who no longer works for the company, so I cannot ask them what they had in mind by doing this. 

By the same token, I also cannot dope-slap them.

Thank you for your brilliance and your willingness to share it.

Bill

[Barb Binder]

By the same token, I also cannot dope-slap them.

OK, that made me laugh out loud, Bill. 😂

To be honest, I've been wondering why anyone would ever add an a to that dialog box, much less two of them. It defies logic. And I'm sorry to hear that they are no longer available to answer our questions. The two theories bouncing around in my head: either an unintentional error by a new user who wasn't paying attention, or a clever bomb planted on the way out by someone who knew Fm very, very well. Either way, this can't work for long again, because now the experts here know what to look for. 😉

Have a great weekend, Bill. We'll see you again next time you hit a snag.

~Barb

[frameexpert]

Maybe they left on bad terms and that was their way of making life miserable for their replacement. I have noted that in case I need it :-).

[Barb Binder]

In case you leave Carmen Publishing? 😂

~Barb

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

<obvious_dripping_sarcasm>I hear his boss (pictured below) is difficult to get along with</>