Feature Request | Could InDesign Make “No Break” Smarter?
September 09, 2019 | Extras | en
While hyphenation settings can be adjusted at the Paragraph
level, Character
options only provide a boolean “No Break” attribute which prevents line breaks whatever the location of the text in the layout. There are cases where this binary parameter seems too rigid…
Line breaking and hyphenation sound like similar features but there aren't equivalent. Consider the boolean attribute “Hyphenate Across Column”. It is available in the Paragraph Style Options—this is a paragraph-scoped setting—and it specifically allows or disallows to hyphenate a word across two columns of text.
On the other side, “No Break” is a character-scoped setting that controls the very possibility of breaking a line (no matter how paragraph hyphenation is addressed.) This is therefore a stronger option, which doesn't even care about the location of the text relative to the column, frame, or page.
On many occasions, these two levels of adjustment can create a conflict of priorities. What if the user want to disallow column breaks (and column breaks only) from within a particular character style? The “No Break” attribute is too harsh, and “Hyphenate Across Column” only controls hyphenation (word breaking) at the paragraph level!
Refining “No Break”
Here is an example. Say a character style is associated to proper names or book titles. You may need to support regular line breaks (including hyphenation) for those items, provided the text still belongs to a single column (or frame, or page.) In other words, you just want to make sure your items always appear in full within a visual container.
For the time being, InDesign doesn't provide any means to satisfy this condition. A way to fix this would be to extend the “No Break” attribute. Instead of a binary choice, a list of distinct options could be implemented as follows:
Note. — The option “No hyphenation” (i.e. “No Word Break”) could be added in that list as well. On this topic, see also Add “no hyphenation” as a character style.
Example
Effect of “No Break”:
Effect of “No Break Across Column”:
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