Manual Soft Hyphen differs from automatic Hyphen

[Achterblad]

There is a visible difference in the length of the dashes. The automatic inserted hyphen is the correct one, very short. But the Soft Hyphen which can be inserted with Cmd plus Dash is longer!
I detected this problem as I was proofreading a paper.
To insert a dash instead of a Soft Hyphen - which I have to do now - is not a good solution if the text is edited or re-formatted later.
Please have a look at this issue. It is not acceptable to have two sorts of hyphens at the end of the lines in the same paragraph (as in the same document).

[martin]

This problem only appears to manifest when using fonts that don't technically cover the soft hyphen character. For example, Optima doesn't cover the soft hyphen character, while Times, Lucida Grande, Garamond, Caslon, Helvetica, etc, do cover the character.

If you have a font applied to a soft hyphen that doesn't cover that character, then font substitution occurs and the hyphen will display using a fallback font, which of course may have hyphen that's longer/shorter than the original font.

We can probably modify NWP's behavior, so that we display a regular hyphen, even if the font doesn't cover a soft hyphen. We actually already do this for non-breaking hyphens. This should keep the hyphen lengths consistent, even if your font doesn't cover soft hyphens. I'll file it as something to investigate, but in the meantime I think all you can do is use another font (almost all of the fonts I tested do cover soft hyphens).

I hope this helps.

[Achterblad]

Since a font change for my publication is out of question - I am using the Sabon family - I look forward to the solution you are proposing. Meanwhile I will edit such places with a zero width space and a dash which I hopefully will replace with a soft hyphen later. Thank you for the quick answer.

[Elbrecht]

Hi -

what version of Sabon are you using? Older versions are not that clever! Try to get a newer/the newest version…

HE

[Achterblad]

OK, it is a Sabon PS from the Linotype Library, dated 2001. Clever or not, it is the only one that I have access to.
My Zero-Width-Space plus Hyphen trick works well, so I am in a comfortable position to wait for a program enhancement.