help with Wrong Hyphenation

[Alisson Stasiak]

Hello everyone!

I'm working on a large report on Adobe InDesign and I'm having some bugs with the hyphenation. Some words are divided totally wrong, like ac-ademic (it should be aca-dem-ic), scienc-es (it should be sci-ences), etc. All me settings are in English:USA and now I don't know what to do because it's imposible to check each word in the dictionary and to change on my Personal Dictionary.

Any suggestion?

Thanks, guys!

[BobLevine]

What makes you think they're breaking in the wrong place? Those look fine to me.

[Alisson Stasiak]

Hi Bob!

As I'm not an English speaker, I'm using a website for hyphenization, to make sure that's everything okay.

Look:

Academic: https://www.hyphenation24.com/word/academic/

Sciences: https://www.hyphenation24.com/word/sciences/

[BobLevine]

Try this instead: Academic | Definition of Academic by Merriam-Webster

[Alisson Stasiak]

OMG, right now I'm suuuuper confused about which one is the right one.

[Barb Binder]

What language is visible when you select the text?

~Barb

[Alisson Stasiak]

Am I seeing in the right place? If it's okay, it appers English: USA.

[BobLevine]

There's nothing wrong with those breaks especially considering that you're using justified type.

[Alisson Stasiak]

Yeees, these one on this screenshot are okay, but some words are hyphenyzed in a strange way.

[BobLevine]

No, they're not. You can change the hyphenation and justification options in your preferences. I would suggest turning on the highlighting in your composition options so you can see what's happening.

[J E L]

@Alisson Stasiak I'm wondering if you have to use hyphenation in the first place? Reading and type aesthetics are improved without using them. Is it because you are using very narrow columns of text? Can the column width be adjusted slightly? Maybe add a little more indentation for your first line in the paragraph? Did you try setting hyphenation to be used only after 6 or 8 characters to see if that helps? Because now you are getting stacked dashes which also looks bad in my opinion. But a hyphen after two letters (Ac-cording) is correct but rarely seen.

[Alisson Stasiak]

Unfortunately, I can't change the Design project for the publishing, because it was previous made. I tried to change the hyphenation option but it didn't work as well.

[Frans v.d. Geest]

"Reading and type aesthetics are improved without using them."

You're joking right? You must be joking...

[J E L]

@Frans v.d. Geest No, I wasn't joking. Other than for printed newspaper reading when it can't be avoided, long text with lots of hyphens is not easy to read or look at for many people who may have trouble seeing words broken up. I try to consider everyone and their unique circumstances.

[Peter Spier]

While I agree the current hyphenation is probably acceptable, I wonder if changing the language setting from European English to to Either English:UK or English:USA would make a difference (and is there a reason you've chosen English:EUR over either of those when you say above that your settings are for English:USA). Language is a character level attribute best set as part of your paragraph style, and is completely unaffected by any settings in the preferences (that just picks your default dictionary language, not the language assigned to text).

[Alisson Stasiak]

I tried to change to English:UK but it didn't work as well. But now I found a good solution (my client wants the words separated as the example I sent) and it's changing to the "English: Legal". With this English options, everything looks ok, but I don't know why.

[J E L]

@Alisson Stasiak Great, glad you found a solution and thanks for letting us know!

[Peter Spier]

You could also add the words to the user dictionary and adjust the hyphenation there for any language.