InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign CS2

Chapter 11. Don’t Fear the Hyphen

THERE’S A LOT OF PREJUDICE against the poor hyphen. Some designers feel that hyphens are ugly and to be avoided at all costs, as if a broken word is somehow inferior to a word with no hyphens. I believe the humble hyphen is our friend. We live in a world of compromises and—as long as the hyphenation breaks make sense—hyphens are preferable to the evils of bad word spacing in justified type, or uneven rags in ragged type. Besides, we’re used to reading hyphenated text. We do it without thinking, rarely if ever pausing to consider the hyphen’s service to the cause of readability. Hyphenation also allows more words to fit on a line, which saves space. That said, a hyphen is only as good as its settings, so it’s important ...