This is a missing feature in Pages.
Many applications use a soft hyphen or discretionary hyphen (unicode 00AD). That is an invisible character in the middle of a word, which only appears when the word needs to be broken into two in a line break.
Let's for example say you want to write an article about something called "efterår". You know the word, and you know that it can be broken into efter-år, if needed. A soft hyphen would be visible only when the word is broken.
Unfortunately, if you try with the soft hyphen 00AD in Pages, you will see that it is visible even when the word does not break: "efter-år".
4 comments:
There's a workaround for this. Pages keeps a configuration at :Library:Application Support:iWork:Pages: HyphenationExceptions.plist.
Typically this will contain entries of words that you've marked with never hyphenate.
For example, if you had inidated that efterår should never be hyphenated, then its entry in the plist would be
key: efterår
string: ~efterår
This is similar to other applications' hyphenation exceptions files. The tilde at the start of the word indicates that it should not be hyphenated at all. Otherwise, a tilde indicates an appropriate hyphenation location.
In order to address your example of getting efter-år, mark the word as non-hyphenating, in order to add it to the exceptions list. Next, quit Pages. Then edit the plist with Apple's Property List Editor, or a regular text editor. Change ~efterår to efter~år and save the file.
Pages should now hyphenate the word the way you want it.
While it's nice to see that Pages can do this, it'd be much better if it had a way of managing the list from Pages itself.
As a clarification to the workaround above, the file HyphenationExceptions.plist is only created once you have right clicked on a word in a Pages document and selected "Never Hyphenate". Once you have done that, you can apparently still in Pages '09 edit the file to determine hyphenations.
Hi, it is quite astonishing that Steve Jobs allowed the beautiful program to be published without conditional hyphenation. Not very writing- and design-friendly...
Even in 2016 I still miss the soft hyphen every day.
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