The set of proofing tools offered by Atlantis now includes Hyphenation. To hyphenate a word across lines is to divide it between two lines of text using a hyphen. End-of-line hyphenation will help you reduce the raggedness of the right margin in left-aligned text and eliminate gaps or "rivers of white" in justified text. Hyphenation will also help you maintain even line lengths in narrow columns. Here is a sample text by way of illustration:

With proper hyphenation of words across lines, your documents will have a more polished and professional look.

There are two ways of hyphenating documents in Atlantis, automatically or manually. Hyphenation can also be customized and controlled in various ways. Read on for details.

Automatic Hyphenation

Automatic Hyphenation in Atlantis is as user-friendly as can be. You only have to write the text of your documents. Words will automatically be hyphenated across lines, and hyphenation will automatically be updated as you make changes to documents. Even then, you have nothing to fear for your documents. Automatic Hyphenation in Atlantis will never insert hard-coded information or make unwanted changes in documents. What's more, Automatic Hyphenation can easily be toggled on or off for each document.

To toggle Automatic Hyphenation on for the current document, you first need to bring up the new Atlantis Tools | Hyphenation… dialog. Then, check the Automatically hyphenate document box:

The Tools | Hyphenation… dialog is also used to adjust a number of hyphenation-related options. You can specify whether you want Atlantis to hyphenate words written all in capital letters or if you want them left out of the hyphenation process. You can limit the number of consecutive end-of-line hyphens.

You can also specify a so called Hyphenation zone:

This is the amount of blank space that Atlantis is allowed to leave between the end of the last word in a line and the right margin. The more blank space is allowed, the less words will be hyphenated across lines. Accordingly,

• use a narrow hyphenation zone to maximize hyphenation across lines.

• use a wide hyphenation zone to minimize hyphenation across lines.

Note:

With left-aligned text, a small hyphenation zone means more hyphens and a less ragged right margin, while a larger zone means fewer hyphens but a more ragged margin.

With justified text, a small hyphenation zone means more hyphens and less white gaps, while a larger zone means fewer hyphens but more white gaps.

The Automatic Hyphenation feature of Atlantis currently supports only the English and French languages. Support for more languages will be added in the future. Accordingly, setting a proper language coding for your document (as indicated in the status bar of Atlantis) is of paramount importance for the good functioning of the Atlantis Automatic Hyphenation feature, just as it is important for the other Atlantis proofing tools (spellchecking, AutoCorrect).

The Atlantis Automatic Hyphenation feature is designed to suggest proper hyphenation patterns based on the linguistic rules and traditions of a particular language. You might never have or wish to change these suggested patterns. But then, if the Atlantis Automatic Hyphenation ever produced unexpected results for particular words, or if you'd rather use your own hyphenation rules, you will always be able to customize the Automatic Hyphenation feature of Atlantis to make it work according to your own preferences. For this, a Customize… button is available in the Tools | Hyphenation… dialog:

It brings up the Customize Hyphenation dialog where you can specify custom hyphenation patterns to be used by Automatic Hyphenation in Atlantis:

These hyphenation patterns include optional hyphens, — that is hyphens that will be inserted whenever required to wrap words over lines. Note that optional hyphens within a pattern are only virtual hyphenation positions. They will be inserted only if necessary, that is to hyphenate words across lines. For example, the “com-bi-na-tion” pattern means that “combination” can be hyphenated across lines in any of the following ways, depending on the size of the empty space at the end of the line and on the width allowed for the hyphenation zone:

com-
bination

combi-
nation

combina-
tion

When the hyphenation pattern suggested by Atlantis actually includes no hyphen, this means that the corresponding word is not usually hyphenated. For example, the following English words are not traditionally hyphenated across lines:

whishes

hoarder

gnarred

whapped

fritzes

whicker

drafty

Note that hyphenation patterns are case insensitive. Atlantis will make no difference between lowercase and uppercase letters. For example, “elvis”, “Elvis”, and “ELVIS” can all be entered for the same hyphenation pattern. But normally, and to make reading more comfortable, all custom hyphenation patterns should be in lowercase.

To sum up, if you do not want particular words to be automatically hyphenated in the way suggested by Atlantis, you have to add your own custom hyphenation pattern for each of them to the current list of custom hyphenation patterns. The hyphenation patterns included in the currently loaded list will be substituted for the patterns normally used by Automatic Hyphenation. You can create as many different files with custom hyphenation patterns as you wish. These plain text files can be created or loaded using the Save To File… or Load From File… buttons found in the Customize Hyphenation dialog:

Tip: these custom hyphenation pattern files can be saved to a removable media and transferred to a different PC where they can be (re)loaded in Atlantis.

Finally, note that by default Automatic Hyphenation is enabled or disabled for the entire document. The Automatically hyphenate document option in the Tools | Hyphenation… dialog is a global characteristic of each document.

However, you might still wish to disable Automatic Hyphenation for specific paragraphs of a document. Here is how to proceed:

1. Select the paragraph(s) that you do not want hyphenated.
2. Bring up the Format | Paragraph… dialog and click the Line and Page Breaks tab.
3. Check the Do not hyphenate box:

    

   

    

Note that Atlantis also never hyphenates text marked with the <None> language.

To sum up, Automatic Hyphenation will skip over paragraphs formatted with either

• the Do not hyphenate option,
• or the <None> language.

Manual Hyphenation

As said above, the Atlantis Automatic Hyphenation should provide proper hyphenation across lines for most documents. But with particular documents or fragments of documents, you might wish to insert hyphens in a different way, according to your own rules. This is done using Manual Hyphenation. Note that as a general rule we recommend postponing manual hyphenation until after you have finished editing documents. Otherwise, you might need to re-hyphenate these documents if you make changes that affect line wrapping of previously hyphenated words.

Here is how to launch Manual Hyphenation in Atlantis:

1. Make a selection if you want to hyphenate only a portion of the document, or leave the whole document unselected if you want to hyphenate it all.
2. Bring up the Tools | Hyphenation… dialog.
3. Press the Manual… button:

When Manual Hyphenation is on, Atlantis searches for words that need hyphenating, then asks you to accept or reject hyphenation for each such word that it finds:

In the above dialog, the red lines show hyphenation as suggested by Atlantis. But of course, you can click within the word to insert a hyphen where you'd rather have it. Then, you can press the Hyphenate button to insert an optional hyphen in the corresponding word of the document. If you press the Don't Hyphenate button instead, Atlantis will skip over that word.

Note that you cannot insert a hyphen between letters when they are displayed on a gray background in the above dialog. The gray area defines a zone where there is no more room for hyphenation at the end of a line.

All hyphens inserted by Manual Hyphenation are optional hyphens (the so-called "soft" hyphens). These optional hyphens are actually only position markers, that is special symbols indicating where words can be broken if they fall at the end of a line and need to be hyphenated. Accordingly, optional hyphens become associated with actual hyphens only when they are used to hyphenate a word across lines. As special symbols, optional hyphens are displayed only when the View | Special Symbols mode is on. In this case, all optional hyphens will display, whether they fall in the middle or at the end of a line, that is whether they indicate virtual positions or are associated with actual hyphens. Both are shown using the following S-shaped special marks:

As special symbols, optional hyphens are saved to RTF, COD, or DOC files just like paragraph end marks or section breaks. Their positions are saved when you close documents, ready to be used when the documents are reopened and modified. Note that Atlantis always inserts and prints optional hyphens only when the associated word needs wrapping over lines. Also note that the location of these manually inserted optional hyphens is never automatically changed by Atlantis. They have to be moved or removed manually.

With Manual Hyphenation, you can re-hyphenate separate fragments of a document. For instance, you might want to hyphenate a new chapter in a document whose other chapters have already been hyphenated with Manual Hyphenation. If you select the new chapter only, then launch Manual Hyphenation (Tools | Hyphenation > Manual), the selected chapter alone will be analyzed by Atlantis and hyphenation suggested for it.

Optional hyphens are inserted by Manual Hyphenation in Atlantis but can also be inserted into words manually. This can be done through:

• the Insert | Symbol… dialog:

   

  

   

• the drop-down menu of the Insert symbol toolbar button:

   

  

   

• the associated hot key (the default hot key to insert optional hyphens is Shift+Alt+Hyphen).

If we leave aside special cases when a word is broken over multiple lines in a document with very narrow columns, Automatic Hyphenation does not normally re-hyphenate words for which optional hyphens have already been defined manually. So optional hyphens can still be added manually to words in a document where Automatic Hyphenation is enabled. Words containing optional hyphens will be hyphenated accordingly and not with their default automatic hyphenation patterns. Manually inserted hyphenation will override automatic hyphenation. You have here a powerful way to control hyphenation in Atlantis and combine automatic and manual hyphenation. Also do not forget that you can define and record custom hyphenation patterns for particular words. See earlier paragraph for details.

For various reasons, you might want to remove hyphenation from a document. Here is how to proceed:

Removing hyphens from an automatically hyphenated document

To remove automatically inserted hyphens from a document, you only have to toggle off its Automatically hyphenate document attribute in the Tools | Hyphenation… dialog.

Removing hyphens from a manually hyphenated document

As we have seen, unlike Automatic Hyphenation, Manual Hyphenation inserts optional hyphens as special symbols into words. Now let's suppose for example that you'd like to use Automatic Hyphenation only in a document previously hyphenated in a manual way. Before you can enable Automatic Hyphenation in your document, you will need to remove all previously inserted optional hyphens from it. Use the Edit | Replace… dialog for this, and replace all instances of "^-" (optional hyphens) with nothing (leave the "Replace with" field empty):

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