197 Permanently disabling hyphenation

- I'm zoomed very close into this layout because I'm checking out the words that are hyphenated. I have another video in this title that talks about how to turn off hyphenation for a particular word on a case-by-case basis by using formatting options like No Break, or adding a discretionary hyphen in front of a word. In this video, though, I want to talk about making a word permanently not able to hyphenate. You might have a lot of proprietary names that you use in your business. You might never want your last name to be hyphenated, for example.

You can add that as what's called a hyphenation exception to InDesign's dictionary so that from then on, every time that you enter that word, or that word becomes poured into a text frame, it will not hyphenate. As an example, let's apply a hyphenation example to this word California, that is hyphenated right here. Now you do not have to wait for a word to misbehave before you can add a hyphenation exception. If you have a list of 10 or 20 0r 50 words, you can just add them in a text frame, and select each one individually and create a hyphenation exception to it.

But we're just going to do this because I think in the real world, this is what often happens to me, is that I'll see a word that is hyphenating that I don't want to, like InDesign. The word InDesign will hyphenate in InDesign by default. It'll put a hyphen between the In and Design, and I've seen it even add a hyphen between the E and the S. That's one of the first things I do whenever I get a new copy of InDesign is select that word and make sure that it never hyphenates. To add a hyphenation exception, you need to add it to the User Dictionary. You can get to the User Dictionary from the edit menu.

Go down to Spelling, and you'll see it in a command right there. But in the real world, what I usually do is right click and then find the Spelling fly out menu and choose User Dictionary there. Now because I had the word selected when I opened up the User Dictionary it automatically populated this field. I click inside the field and I say, "Hyphenate. "Show me how you're going to hyphenate this word." InDesign adds a number of tildes in between letters indicating where it's most prone to hyphenate. So the more number of tildes, like after the L there's 3 tildes, it will be most prone to hyphenate right there, and then as a second choice it will hyphenate here and here.

To prevent this word from ever hyphenating you need to get rid of all those tildes. So I'm getting rid of them. Then you need to add one more in front of the word. So I click in front of the capital C and press the tilde. Now, if it's okay with me that California, if it's written in all lower case, can be hyphenated, I just don't want the one that starts with a capital letter to hyphenate, then that means that I'm concerned about case sensitivity, and I would turn on Case Sensitive here. But because it's turned off, that means that whenever the word California appears, whether it's a capital or not, it is not going to hyphenate.

The last thing you need to do here is click Add, and that adds it to your User Dictionary. That means that it's going to be in effect for all documents that you create on this computer. You can see it immediately made the word California fit onto one line. If the word California was hyphenated anywhere else in this story that I'm currently editing, as soon as I added the hyphenation exception it would force those instances to become unhyphenated. If the word is elsewhere in this document, I would have to first click inside that story, and that wakes up InDesign's text composer engine and it will automatically unhyphenate any hyphenated instances of the word California.

That's how it works, by the way, for all your other docs. So if I opened up another document right now that had the word California that was hyphenated, it would stay hyphenated. So you don't have to worry about your legacy documents changing. It's only until you click inside the text frame with the type tool that InDesign will recompose the text, and keep that in mind. Now that I've turned the word California into a hyphenation exception, I never have to worry about proofing my documents for instances of where it did become hyphenated, and I do this a lot to all of the proprietary words that I use in a lot of my writings, to family names.

It's one of my favorite features in the program.