Text Wrap and Hyphenation¶

Even though xerif is an automatic typesetting system, it is sometimes necessary to manually control line breaks. However, you should be aware that too much manual interventions may lead to unpleasant results elsewhere. In addition, xerif is not intended for "manual typesetting" and is not as efficient as DTP typesetting programs such as Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher in this regard.

There are various ways to change line breaking manually.

Text Wrap commands¶

With Microsoft Word's on-board tools, you can already control the text wrap to a certain extent:

Word symbol (Unicode)	Description	Key combination
° (U+00A0)	protected space	Ctrl + Shift + Space
¬ (U+00AD)	conditional hyphen	Ctrl + -
- (U+00A0)	protected hyphen	Ctrl + Shift + _
↵	Soft Return	Shift + Enter
⏎	Page break	Ctrl + Enter

Unicode Symbols¶

There are some Unicode characters to control line breaks:

Name	Unicode	Description
Zero Width Space	U+200B	marks a potential line break without hyphenation
Non-Breaking Hyphen	U+2011	Hyphen that does not break to the next line
Narrow No-Break Space	U+202F	Narrow space that does not break to the next line

Processing instructions¶

xerif comes with so-called processing instructions: These are commands that are carried by Word up to the page break. The PI must be inserted in Word and assigned the PI format:

PI (Unicode)	Description
+1	Extend paragraph by 1 line
-1	Catch up paragraph by 1 line
↡ (U+21A1)	Page break but fills up line
\tpNewTocPage	Page break only in ToC, insert before heading

Hyphenation¶

xerif uses language-specific hyphenation patterns according to which hyphenation is carried out. However, these hyphenation patterns may not achieve the desired results for certain words. Therefore xerif also supports hyphenation lists. These are text files which store the desired hyphenation for a word, e.g.

=== hyph-en.txt ===
acad-e-my
acad-e-mies
ac-cu-sa-tive
...

You can also upload title-specific hyphenation patterns. These must be uploaded and versioned in the form {$filename}-hyph-{$languagecode}.txt (e.g. brill_521922_Mihalik-hyph-en.txt). The exact file naming convention may differ, as this depends on the customer-specific naming conventions and you should coordinate this with your contact person.