Planet Quark

Sometimes, a word won’t hyphenate at the end of a line where YOU would like it to break. Rather than typing in a hyphen, which will flow along with the word if the line re-wraps, use a “discretionary hyphen”: an invisible character that tells your program to break and hyphenate a word at the end of a line when necessary — but to remove the hyphen if the word wraps to the next line.

To add a discretionary hyphen to a word in QuarkXPress, press Command-Hyphen where you want it to hyphenate. (Windows: Ctrl-Hyphen)

To prevent a word from hyphenating at all, use the same keyboard shortcut, but use it just before the word: in QuarkXPress, press Command-Hyphen before the word. (Windows: Ctrl-Hyphen)

To break a word or sentence at the end of a line, without using a hyphen, press Shift-Return.

To create a quick hanging indent, go to the first line of the paragraph and press Command-backslash where you’d like the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc., lines to indent. This is known as the “indent here” character. (Windows: Ctrl-backslash)

All these invisible characters can be removed later by backspacing over them.

QuarkXPress 7 and 8 have a menu item that lets you accomplish some of these tasks:

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