Is there any method to avoid hyphenation before a charcter in different words throughout an InDesign document?

Question

I am using FML Malayalam fonts (not based on Unicode) to design a newspaper. Hunspell dictionaries are totally useless for these kind of fonts. In Malayalam language some characters have to go along with other characters to make it meaningful. Eg. കാടി - in this word of four charecters the first and third characters are constants while second and fourth characters act like vowels. But we cannot seperate a constant from its vowel and these vowel charecters appear after almost every constants in every words.

In FML Malayalam fonts all characters appear seperately. The letters in this font are assigned to english letters and symbols.

Hence I am looking for a way to keep them together in every word throughout a document. I have already tried adding charecters with along with tildes to dictionary but that also doesn't work well as some charecters are assigned to symbols like '(,{,]', etc. As there are numerous words in the language, Adding words to dictionary with hyphenation properties is also not an easy option

I even tried using Nonbreaking hyphen feature but turns out that while joining one word, another two or more breaks.

Peter Kahrel · Accepted Answer

That also didnt work well as expected. As i had mentioned earlier, the malayalam letters are assigned to all keys on keyboard including the symbols.

These are the Malayalam consonants:

IJKLMNOPQRSTUWVXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijkl¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåï∙

These are vowels that come before a consonant:

st{

And these are vowels that come after a consonant:

mnopqruvwxyz

I still hope there might be some method to get this working in InDesign.

Instead of keeping together CV (consonant+vowel) pairs, maybe it's better to insert discretionary breaks after CV pairs:

Find what: [IJKLMNOPQRSTUWVXYZ\[\\\]\^_`abcdefghijkl¡¢£¤¥\¦§¨©ª«¬®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåï∙]\K([mnopqruvwxyz])

Change to: $1~k

Which paraphrases as 'Find V preceded by C, replace the V with itself and discretionary line break'. Note the added backslashes before [ \ ] and | -- these are special symbols in Grep, and you need to indicate that you're looking for the literal characters. (That's probably why it didn't work for you earlier.)

This probably works better because keeping various combinations together doesn't guarantee that words will break at every permissible place.

winterm · Answer

Sorry, know nothing about Malayalam language…

Speaking in terms of Latin languages, this will found any word character

a\K\w

or just any character

a\K.

that follows character a.

You can apply nobreak char style to it, and pairs aa, ab, ac, ..., az, a1, a9, or even a’, a:, a! and so on (using the second regex) will never break.

Also you can make it case-insensitive:

(?i)a\K\w

Hopefully this can help you to find a suitable solution.

Note: these regex will work on CS6 and higher. For lower versions you should use regular Positive Lookbehind: (?<=a)\w or (?<=a). instead of \K

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