ninjagame wrote:withoutFeathers -
Hope that helps
- ninjagame
Hi ninjagame,
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
None of your suggestions fixed it...

...but working through them jogged my memory and caused me to understand what's going on.
In short, for anyone else who has this problem, it seems that:
A) It's caused by the fact that my font (New Century Schoolbook) doesn't have a soft hyphen in its character set, and so Apple throws in a default from some other font. (NCS becomes red in the sidepanel, indicating that it's not there, when I select the introduced soft-hyphen).
B) If I change the soft-hyphen font to something else (most other fonts), it's a nice-size regular small hyphen, indicating that those fonts do have a soft-hyphen character.
I believe I may have fixed this in the past by choosing Automatic Normal hyphenation, so that most of the hyphens are set by Apple, (which then uses a real hyphen in NCS), and then creating a character style with another font, and applying it after-the-fact, for the odd one that I want to force as a soft-hyphen.
I guess the elegant solution would be to have a place where I could change Apple's default of which font it replaces with, but I doubt if I have access to that anywhere.
WF
Oops! Spoke too soon. I discover now that I do have access to that: Preferences->Languages->Secondary Font. If I put a font in there that has a soft-hyphen, all is well, it gets used. Problem solved!
