Turning the discretionary hyphen off?

[Joel_Cherney@adobeforums.com]

I'm formatting a Lao document in InDesign 3.01 on Win2K. My Lao translator has used a discretionary hyphen to insert optional word breaks (there aren't any spaces between Lao words, they just run the phrases together, so where the line break is can sometimes change the meaning of the sentence).

The problem is, it seems that ID can't distinguish between what I know as "hyphen minus" and "soft hyphen." The soft one is discretionary, but the minus sign is just that - the minus sign. In the Lao font I'm using (Saysettha Lao), there's a character ("LAO LETTER NO" - it resembles a backwards letter "u" in appearance) that is mapped to the minus sign. When I get the text into ID, both the soft hyphen and the minus sign become discretionary hyphens. Therefore, it drops the character, but I can't do a global find/replace, because that will replace all of my optional word breaks with the no character.

Any suggestions? Is there a setting to turn that discretionary hyphen off? Or should I just convert to Saysettha Unicode (which is a real hassle, the conversion drops other characters) and redo the whole document?

(There doesn't seem to be any articles in the KB that apply to me; nor do previous forum postings that I've found. If I'm wrong, could you please just post to say "look closer"? I'd appreciate it.)

[M_Blackburn@adobeforums.com]

Joel,

The only font I have here (have dozens at home) is Lao Sukanya, and the discretionary hyphen idea doesn't work for it. I get a box drawn after the hyphen. But that font has a zero value word space so that line breaks naturally happen between words. I have never heard of using a discretionary hyphen for that.

I'll have to talk to a Lao typesetter I know and ask a few questions. When I use Lao, which is almost never anymore, I use my own font which has a custom keyboard layout so that I can remember where the letters are and there is bound to be other major differences from what you're using.

[Thomas_Phinney@adobeforums.com]

It sounds like you have a font that lies about its encoding, if the Lao letter "no" is mapped to the hyphen. A hard hyphen is a perfectly reasonable place to break a word, it's just that it always displays. Fonts that lie about their encoding can be expected to misbehave, particularly in Unicode applications.

That being said, it doesn't help that InDesign really doesn't support Lao. A proper Lao font might not even show up in the ID font menu.

Sorry to sound so negative, but I suspect you're in trouble....

Regards,

T

[Thomas_Phinney@adobeforums.com]

I forgot to mention, although the normal hyphen is sometimes used as a minus sign, there is a completely separate "real" minus sign in Unicode, in its own unique slot.

soft hyphen: U+00AD
hyphen: U+002D
minus: U+2212

The soft hyphen is generally regarded as a control character, which is used internally by applications--in this case to indicate discretionary hyphenation when they break a line. Since the soft hyphen is often not even present as a slot in the font (like most other control characters), the hyphen may be displayed when the soft hyphen code is used in the text.

T

[Thomas]

I also has a problem.
There is a fundamental controversy about the soft hyphen character (often abbreviated SHY, one HTML notation: *). Although the ISO Latin 1 standard (ISO 8859-1) makes things perfectly clear, saying that it is a visible hyphen, to be used in a specific context, it is commonly regarded as hidden hyphenation hint, and this is what the Unicode standard currently says. These two views are incompatible. For more read: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html

If your question is "How to make visible the soft-hypen", I am searching an answer for so long. As far as I know, there is no fix. Its a conflict between the ISO-8859-1 Code table and the Unicode Code table. Both are incompatible with this issue.