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I 've been searching for the solution to my issue both in the support manual and in the Forum, but I didn't succeed. It could be related to the fact that I don't really know how to explain my need in english, if it is so, I just hope that you could understand me and help me find the right solution.

I am finishing a book with NWP (the latest version), and I do a lot of work with kerning because, I think all of you NWP will understand me, a visually pleasing result matters. Kerning does a lot, but sometimes I would need more. Since I deal with a lot of long-winded words sometimes I need to separate a word across two lines, split it. And since I am not writing in English, NWP can be mistaken when splitting a word on its own: I hope I could help it!

How can I decide precisely where to split a word? I really need to be in control of it, and I am confident that's something that NWP will allow me to do, and you expert users will know hot to do!

Many thanks for reading and helping!

D

Ah, not to worry about your English- it's very good and clear! I think the technical term you are missing is "hyphenation". To be sure, let me describe it: hyphenation is what happens when a long word is split between two lines and a dash/hyphen "-" character is shown like so:

Some regular text with a supercalifragilis-
ticexpialidociously long word in the middle.

Is that what you're talking about? If so, there are a couple of things to mention.

First, hyphenation in Nisus Writer is currently handled by OSX. Unfortunately Apple's hyphenation support for non-English languages isn't very good. Here's a thread that discusses this problem and provides (some rather technical) workarounds. We'd like to improve this situation.

If the automatic hyphenation isn't working well, you can insert soft hyphens into your text (which are shown/used if the word must be split/hyphenated). To insert a soft hyphen, use the menu Insert > Special Character > Dashes and Hyphens > Soft Hyphen. If you insert a soft hyphen, you must also enable hyphenation using the menu View > Hyphenation.

I hope that helps. Please let me know if I misunderstood, or you have any questions.

Thank you Martin. That's precisely what I was looking for. To be honest, I even already turned on hyphenation (Frequent) but when I insert a soft Hyphen nothing seems to happen.
Here what appears on screen when trying to cut synthétique into synthé- tique with a soft hyphen:



Is it meant to be this way?

D

From your screenshot it looks like the word "synthétique" fits on a single line. In that case the soft hyphen will not be used (ie: it will only show as an invisible mark, as in your screenshot; no visible dash will appear and the word will not be split between lines). It's only if the word can't fit at the end of a single line when the soft hyphen will be used as a division point.

So, it seems you are trying to split a word between lines, but in the situation where that word naturally fits on that line? That seems a bit odd, but in that case you could insert a regular (hard) hyphen, which might make the word long enough so it is split between lines. If that's not enough, you could insert a regular hyphen followed by a soft return (line break). Neither of those options are ideal, because if the word changes position (after some editing or reformatting) and it is no longer near the end of a line, the hyphen/break will still be used.

Thank you Martin, I think I got it.

Clearly using a hard hyphen is a tricky decision, but using soft hyphens and then playing with kerning can be the right solution for me. Nonetheless, I look forward to the update of Nisus featuring a better hyphenation for other languages (hard to believe, Nisus isn't perfect! )

D

Happy to help, and glad you found a strategy that works well enough for you for now.