Change glyph of automatic hyphens

[apinhas]

I am writing a manuscript in InDesign using a particular font whose aesthetics I like.  However, the hyphens/dashes look particularly odd. I therefore wish to change the hyphen glyph of this font to the hyphen glyph of another font.

I can manually go through the document and change the glyph for the hyphens/dashes which I have intentionally inserted. But if I have automatic hyphenation turned on, sometimes the text breaks at the margin and hyphens appear. I have tried manually changing the glyph for these hyphens, but InDesign does not allow it. 

Is there any way to change the glyph of the automatic hyphen in InDesign? 

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

Yes – with considerable difficulty, though. It's not a "setting" in InDesign (for some reason many contemporary users assume just about everything is a "setting") and definitely not an easy fix.

Marc Autret describes the problems on his site: http://www.indiscripts.com/post/2017/05/customize-indesign-hyphens-with-indyfont. His smart solution uses the full version of IndyFont (disclaimer: developed by me and maintained & sold by Marc), so it's not something you can try out with the free demo version.*

To elaborate: you most certainly can change 'normal' (manually entered) hyphens with a GREP style (apply another font to only hyphens), but as Marc explains, this will not target discretionary hyphens, and you'd still get the original font hyphen.

* Something I realised only after re-reading the article: Marc creates an entire new font for this to make it work. It's possible to make a clone of a font with IndyFont but do note that it's not designed to do that: all existing features (such as kerning and any OpenType enhancements) will not carry over. To mimic Marc's trick on an existing font, you need a full font editor. It goes without saying, though, that editing an existing font is not something that may be allowed by its EULA.