Editorium Update

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been working on a long, complex book that had to be typeset in Microsoft Word. I learned a lot from the experience, and I’ll be passing on some of that hard-won knowledge in future issues. As I worked on the book, one problem quickly became apparent: Microsoft Word has no hyphenation exception dictionary. A hyphenation exception dictionary is a list of words that specifies how certain words should (or should not) be broken at the end of a line. For example, a really tiny hyphenation exception dictionary might include the following entries as words that shouldn’t be broken at all:

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Last week’s newsletter explained how to use a zero-width nonbreaking space to keep a word from breaking at the end of a line when hyphenation is turned on (Tools > Language > Hyphenation > Automatically hyphenate document). Fine as far as it goes. But what can you do to break a word at a place other than one Microsoft Word insists on using? For example, Word will happily break “convertible” as “converti-ble.” Ugh. (See your favorite style manual for more information about how to break words properly; I prefer The Chicago Manual of Style.)

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I’ve recently been editing a long, scholarly tome that, for reasons I’ll discuss in a future newsletter, my co-workers and I decided to typeset in Microsoft Word, following the techniques explained here:

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