Avoid funny hyphenation

[Eric74]

I suspect that there's no good answer to this question... but you guys always
have a lot of good ideas, so I figured I'd at least ask.

I'm using auto-hyphenation in Word 2003. Word sometimes hyphenates a word in
what I consider the "wrong" place. For example,
neu-roscience rather than neuro-science,
hyphena-tion rather than hyphen-ation,
psy-chotherapy rather than psycho-therapy

When I notice this, I can usually fix these cases individually, by manually
putting in an optional hyphen in what I consider the "right" place. But
that's a big chore, and it limits the usefulness of auto-hyphenation if I
have to visually inspect Word's hyphenation. Is there any better way to get
Word to hyphenate more logically?

Thanks.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You suspect correctly. I don't know of any way to cause Word to break words
in a "favored" place when its lexicon syllabifies a word and allows a break
between any two syllables. This is different from the issue in which Word is
breaking Words that should not be broken at all, as was brought up in
another thread (breaking "Chr-ist," for example); if Word is doing that,
then it's a bug in the hyphenation lexicon and should be reported and
corrected.

I've never actually tried to use automatic hyphenation (for this reason and
others). In ragged right text, the current fashion seems to be to leave it
*very* ragged, but I will scan line ends and hyphenate manually as needed to
smooth the right edge. In justified text, I scan for loose lines and insert
optional hyphens as required (I usually try to avoid doing this until
editing is complete); sometimes I'll edit to make a line end more
gracefully. My daughter likes to format text as ragged right, looked for
extra-ragged places and correct them, then justify, and this would
accomplish the same thing.

The one pitfall to look out for with manual hyphenation is that when you
insert an optional hyphen, Word treats it the same as any other punctuation
(which it should not; this is a bug IMO), and if the text before the hyphen
happens to be the "trigger" text for an AutoCorrect entry, you can get some
extremely interesting results!

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Eric74]

Thanks, Suzanne.

Since I have your attention (if I still have it!) maybe you can answer a
related question about Auto-Correct, or maybe a similar feature.

There's some functionality in Word that fixes words that are separated
incorrectly. For example, if I type "int he", Word corrects it to "in the".
It doesn't seem to be the standard Auto-Correct, which has an explicit entry
to convert "inthe" to "in the". The Auto-Correct lexicon seems to include
only single words (or strings of characters without spaces), such as "inthe",
and not multiple words such as "int he".

How does Word do this? Is it using a lexicon? If so, where is it? It must be
awfully big. Or is it based on the spell-checker... if Word finds an
incorrectly spelled word, it tries to take a letter from the following word,
or give a letter to the next word, so that both are spelled correctly?

Thanks.

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

Note, though, that different authorities (i.e., different
dictionaries) have different hyphenation principles -- American ones
tend to follow morpheme boundaries, British ones tend to follow
syllable breaks willy-nilly: so perhaps you're using the English (UK)
proofing tools but have more of an American sensibility? (Though I
don't think any authority would prefer hyphen-ation).

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Word does seem to have some kind of "hidden" AutoCorrect entries; I haven't
made a study of it, nor have I read anything documenting the behavior (which
of course we've all gratefully experienced), so I don't have any idea how
it's done, but I would guess it is hard-coded in the program.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org