Wonky Hyphenation

InDesign does a fantastic job at breaking words at the end of a line according to a variety of settings within the software:

It has built-in dictionaries for various languages, but it can still get a word break wrong. InDesign uses the language assigned to the text, so a French word marked as English may receive English hyphenation. You can add a note to the text saying: “Hyphenate according to French.” But what happens if the word is transliterated or the proposed break is simply wrong?

In the example below, InDesign incorrectly hyphenated the word “conspiracists” after the letter “c”. Merriam-Webster gives the singular as con·spir·a·cist, so the plural keeps “cists” together. If you are marking up the text for bad breaks, you might be tempted to fix it like this:

As you can see, the letter “c” was deleted, and then another “c” was inserted before “ists”. Unfortunately, this doesn’t do anything because InDesign will hyphenate in the same spot after implementing the correction. We haven’t told InDesign where the correct point is to hyphenate. Also, we haven’t given the option to hyphenate after the syllable “con”, which might result in better spacing. Finally, the word might occur in other places in the text. Instead, rather than “correcting the word”, we need to indicate how the word should be hyphenated in InDesign.

Fortunately, we can not only indicate this during PDF markup, but also show our preferred place to hyphenate. In other words, we are giving weighting to the hyphenation. Using Merriam-Webster’s division points, we can mark the plural as con~spir~a~cists, with each tilde showing a possible break. These tildes are instructions to the typesetter, not characters to leave in the finished text.

To add weight to the hyphenation, we can use several tildes. Suppose we prefer a break after “con”, then after “a”, and finally after “spir” if neither gives good spacing. One tilde marks the preferred break, two a less preferred break and three a poor but acceptable break:

The typesetter can enter these hyphenation preferences in the appropriate InDesign dictionary and ensure that the document uses them. A PDF comment alone does not change the dictionary or update every occurrence. Once the exception is applied, check the resulting line breaks throughout the manuscript: