{"id":7531,"date":"2015-06-26T00:01:44","date_gmt":"2015-06-26T07:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7531"},"modified":"2015-06-20T09:48:29","modified_gmt":"2015-06-20T16:48:29","slug":"hyphenation-the-forlorn-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7531","title":{"rendered":"Hyphenation, the Forlorn Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ages ago, hyphenation was a common and useful feature in a word processor. It was part of the paragraph feature that adjusted long words, splitting them to make a line of text look better. Microsoft Word still offers this feature, although it’s disabled and rarely used.
\n
\nSo when was the last time you used hyphenation? Probably never.<\/p>\n

Hyphenation is used primarily with full justification. It helps split up long words that wreck the neat left and right margins. Even so, Word does a good job placing micro-spaces into a line of text, so hyphenation isn’t really necessary.<\/p>\n

If you’re dying to use Hyphenation, then you’ll locate its command button on the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group. I have no idea why it landed there. I would guess that hyphenation was a paragraph-level format, but no.<\/p>\n

When you click the Hyphenation button you see a menu, as shown in Figure 1. It features the three settings: None, Automatic, and Manual.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 1. The Hyphenation command button menu thing.<\/p><\/div>\n

The None setting is chosen by default. Again, my guess is that word uses miro-spaces to fill in a fully-justified line of text, so hyphenation isn’t needed. And in many cases, people don’t want hyphens in words anyhow.<\/p>\n

The Automatic option directs Word to split any long words lingering at the right end of a line of text. Word pulls a King Solomon and splits the word at a convenient syllable, adding a hyphen character for display-purposes. (If you edit the text and the word shifts to another location, the hyphen character vanishes.)<\/p>\n

The Manual option is what allows you to use a hyphen character to split a long word at the end of a line. If this option isn’t set, then sticking a hyphen (dash, minus, whatever) into a word won’t split the word between two lines. You probably have never experienced this frustration, mostly because, well, no one hyphenates anything any more!<\/p>\n

Choose the Hyphenation Options menu item to display the Hyphenation dialog box, shown in Figure 2.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 2. The Hyphenation dialog box.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Hyphenation dialog box gives you control over Word’s hyphenation options. It’s handy, but like the hyphenation feature itself, it’s just not important any longer. Still, it’s nice that Word didn’t kill the feature entirely.<\/p>\n

I’d still like to find long-dead Word features and see whether they’re worthy of ressurrection. When a program has been around as long as Word, the developer frequently won’t kill legacy features. For a while I thought that Hyphenation was one of them. I was wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Still available, but not really necessary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-7531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-word"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7531"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7549,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7531\/revisions\/7549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}