Faux hyphens
Semantically correct preparation of documents for export to tagged PDF (or to EPUB) implies that hyphens must be done the right way - usually only showing up at the end of lines, when hyphenation had to be applied to word to facilitate a nice looking line break and decent paragraph justification. Once hyphenation changes, hyphens should go away again, as otherwise they would show up in the middle of a line.
Dashes should only show up in the middle of a line, as part of words, if that is intentional. For example, the word "Plug-in" always has the dash inside the word, whereas "Exten-sions" (with a 'forgotten' hyphen in the middle of the word) just doesn't look right.
The Problem locator "Faux hyphens" detects dashes at the end of lines where those dashes should rather be soft hyphens (also formally called discretionary hyphen), and offers to fix them by replacing them with a soft hyphen.
Note: In case you wanted to better understand what special characters are supported by InDesign, the following document by "InDesign Secrets" is very handy:
- "The InDesign Secrets Guide to Special Characters in Adobe InDesign®"
- download as PDF from: http://indesignsecrets.com/downloads/guide_specialchars-2011.pdf
- the document has been prepared for use with InDesign CS5.5
Locating faux hyphens
Running the "Locate faux hyphen" Problem Locator leads to a suspect right away. In this case, the word "platform" was hyphenated by inserting a dash. If text reflows, this will unpleasantly show up as "plat-form".
Just click on the "Fix" button to replace the dash with a soft hyphen.
Text reflow reveals the ugliness of using dashes versus soft hyphens
Dash has ben replaced by a soft hyphen
A click on the "Fix" button replaced the dash at the end of the line with a more suitable soft hyphen.
Soft hyphens 'come and go' as needed and do not play havoc with the text on reflow
Note: The visualization of hidden characters as well as various types of white space characters is sometimes difficult to see and understand. Turning on "Show Hidden Characters" is a good idea though to keep an eye on these. While hidden characters and white space characters are by definition not normally visible they play an important role in terms of content structure and should be handled properly.
Not all dashes at the end of a line are faux hyphens!
Here we have a dash at the end of a line that we do not want to replace by a soft hyphen. When text reflows, "well-functioning' should still contain the dash. In this case it does not make sense to use the "Fix" button, instead, simply go to the remaining possible problems.