Skip to main content

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • Home
  • Learn About Fonts & Typography
  • fy(t)i
  • Fine Typography
  • Discretionary Hyphens
All

Fontology

 
All articles:
Using Type Tools:
Font Info:
Situational Typography:
Typographic Reference:
Glyphs & Characters:
Fine Typography:
  • Eight Tips for Type on the Web
  • Creative Indents
  • Discretionary Hyphens
  • Double Spaces Between Sentences…NOT!
  • Emphasis: Italics and Boldface
  • Finessing Typographic Details: Positioning Punctuation
  • Footnotes and Endnotes
  • Good Display Face Part 2
  • Good Text Face Part 1
  • Headline Line Breaks
  • Headlines
  • Word Spacing: How-to
  • Hyphenation
  • Pull Quotes
  • Smart Quotes
  • Think Big: Using Text Fonts at Display Sizes
  • Think Small: Using Display Fonts at Text Sizes
  • Top 5 Type Tips for 2009
  • Top Ten Type Crimes
  • Type Sizes
  • Typographic Hierarchy
  • Underlining Text
  • + More...
Fontology

Discretionary Hyphens

Previous Article
Next Article

by Ilene Strizver

Now that you’ve nailed the difference between hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes, surely there can’t be any more little horizontal lines to learn about? In fact, you can add one more term to the mix: the discretionary hyphen, an application-based hyphen with a brain.

Discretionary Hyphens

In simple terms, discretionary hyphens know how to become invisible unless needed. A discretionary hyphen is manually inserted where you, the user, want a word to break if and when that word appears at the end of a line. If the text reflows and the need for hyphenation is eliminated, the hyphen disappears.

Use a discretionary hyphen (sometimes called a ‘soft’ hyphen) rather than a ‘hard’ hyphen whenever you want to overrule or tweak the automatic hyphenation generated by your application. This way you’ll prevent those nasty hyphenated words that can unexpectedly appear in the middle of a line when text is reflowed (we’ve all seen this atrocious occurrence!).

The discretionary hyphen also has a lesser-known but very useful feature: if you place it in front of a word (or a string of characters acting as a word, such as an email address), that word will never be hyphenated (and the hyphen, of course, remains invisible). This is a good way to prevent email addresses, URLs, proper nouns and words in headlines from being split in two by your application’s automatic hyphenation settings.

Visit our Typography Articles Page to read more about Typography.

 

Previous Article
Next Article