Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Why hyphenate?
  2. How does hyphen­ation work?
  3. Which browsers sup­port hyphenation?
  4. Does hyphen­ation effect search?
  5. What are the limitations?
  6. Can I make hyphen­ation exceptions?
  7. What are widows and why protect them?
  8. "HTML" or "For­mat­ted Text" output?
  9. Should I keep a backup of my unhyphenated text?

Why hyphenate?

Hyphen­ation increases the visual appeal of your web­site. When jus­tifying text with­out hyphen­ation, word spac­ing is dis­tract­ingly large. With left-​aligned text, the right edge will be unnec­es­sar­ily ragged. Con­sider the fol­low­ing examples:

Non-​hyphenated Justified Text
Julie Andrews famously coined the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in the 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins.
Non-​hyphenated Left-​Aligned Text
Julie Andrews famously coined the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in the 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins.
Hyphen­ated Justified Text
Julie Andrews famously coined the word “su­per­cal­ifrag­ilis­tic­ex­pi­ali­do­cious” in the 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins.

How does hyphenation work?

HTML defines a spe­cial char­ac­ter for hyphen­ation. The soft-​hyphen (­) is an invis­i­ble char­ac­ter that com­mu­ni­cates to web browsers allow­able line breaks within words. When a web browser wraps a line at a soft-​hyphen, a hyphen is shown at line's end.

HTML also defines a zero-​space char­ac­ter (​). Sim­i­lar to the soft-​hyphen, the zero-​space char­ac­ter com­mu­ni­cates allow­able line breaks within strings of text. But unlike the soft-​hyphen, it does not show a hyphen at line's end. This is ideal for forc­ing con­sis­tent wrap­ping of long URLs. It also can be used to force line breaks in unco­op­er­a­tive web browsers after hard-​hyphens in words like "zero-​space" and "soft-​hyphen".

Which browsers support hyphenation?

Not all browsers sup­port online hyphen­ation. Notably, before ver­sion 3, Fire­fox did not sup­port hyphen­ation. For­tu­nately, it failed grace­fully — hyphen­ated text dis­played as if it was unhyphenated.

That is more than could be said for early ver­sions of Safari (ver­sions 1.2 and ear­lier). Those ver­sions of Safari dis­played a hyphen at every pos­si­ble hyphen­ation point — even if it was not at line's end. Hyph-​n.com pro­vides javascript code that can be used to remove hyphen­ation from Safari 1.2 and earlier.

Start­ing with Inter­net Explorer 6, Fire­fox 3, Safari 2, and Opera 8, all major web browsers have offered full sup­port for online hyphenation.

Does hyphenation effect search?

That depends on the search engine. Google and Yahoo prop­erly handle the soft-​hyphen char­ac­ter with­out penalty. Microsoft and Ask.com improp­erly treat soft-​hyphens as word breaks. As of Novem­ber 2007, Google and Yahoo com­prised 86.3% of the search market share. Microsoft and Ask com­prised 13.1%

If hyphen­ation is sup­ported, the fol­low­ing searches should return a link to http://​hyph-​n.​com/faq in the results:

What are the limitations?

Online hyphen­ation does not pro­vide a means to limit hyphen­ation of adja­cent lines. The spell check in many text edi­tors are not soft-​hyphen aware. And if you force wrap­ping of URLs, copy­ing the URL and past­ing it directly in a web browser's address bar will result in errors (select­ing the option to auto­mat­i­cally link all URLs helps to mit­i­gate this concern).

Lastly, some older web browsers fail mis­er­ably when pre­sented soft-​hyphens or zero-​width spaces. We pro­vide a JavaScript file that removes these char­ac­ters from unco­op­er­a­tive browsers.

Can I make hyphenation exceptions?

Yes. If you do not like how a word is auto­mat­i­cally hyphen­ated, select the "Options" button and define your pre­ferred hyphen­ation. Just sep­a­rate your excepted words with spaces and place a hyphen ("-") every­where you would like to allow a hyphen­ation point.

What are widows and why protect them?

A widow is the final word in a block of text that falls to its own line. Espe­cially if the widow is only a few char­ac­ters long, she can get lonely. Hyph-​n.com will try to pro­tect widows by bring­ing them com­pany from the previous line.

There is danger that the widow's com­pany will leave the pre­vi­ous line with less than opti­mal word spac­ing. The risk is less if your text is left-​aligned, but if it is jus­ti­fied, tread care­fully. The pro­tec­tion of widows is com­pletely cus­tomiz­able in the hyphen­ation form's options.

"HTML" or "Formatted Text" output?

The HTML output main­tains all sub­mit­ted HTML tags. This option will hyphen­ate entire HTML files with­out dis­turb­ing the HTML struc­ture. With this option, you will see all hyphen­ation points marked with "­".

The For­mat­ted Text output option processes any sub­mit­ted HTML and out­puts for­mat­ted text. With this option, you will not see any hyphen­ated points unless they are at line's end. This option is ideal if the text will be pasted into a word proces­sor. You will find that the qual­ity of hyphen­ation pro­vided by hyph-​n.com far exceeds the built-​in pro­vi­sion of Microsoft Word.

With either option, HTML markup of the sub­mit­ted text is not required

Should I keep a backup of my unhyphenated text?

Yes.