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I am a writer for a software product. Like many software products, we deal with lots of options in our documentation. A command might look like:
do_something -my_way -hurry_up
Options have leading hyphens in their names. The problem is that FrameMaker will take every opportunity to use these hyphens to wrap lines. Some documentation text might originally exist as:
If you want to do something your way, use the -my_way option to get your way.
but will get wrapped as:
If you want to do something your way, use the -
my_way option to get your way.
We explored using FrameMaker's nonbreaking hyphens (ESC, -, h). This does work, but has the following drawbacks:
I would really love a FrameMaker option which allows me to suppress hyphenation at hyphens which exist at the beginning of a word, with no prefix letters before the hyphen. I don't mind if FrameMaker hyphenates at other manually-written hyphens inside words, but I want it to leave my leading hyphens alone.
Have others run into this challenge while writing for a software product? Thanks!
- Chris
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It does indeed solve the wrapped leading-hyphen problem for options, but of course it also suppresses wrapping at manually hyphenated words. Still, this is a promising approach. I'll run it by my team and see what they think.
Thanks Brian!
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Our team discussed it, and we have decided on this solution. Other editors also did not like wrapping at manually-inserted hyphens in the middle of words (like "short-circuited") so this solution suggestion ends up killing two birds with one stone. Thank you, BEPubs!