• Global community
    • Language:
      • Deutsch
      • English
      • Español
      • Français
      • Português
  • 日本語コミュニティ
    Dedicated community for Japanese speakers
  • 한국 커뮤니티
    Dedicated community for Korean speakers
Exit
0

Suppressing line wrapping at hyphens in option names ("-some_option")

Explorer ,
Jan 26, 2011 Jan 26, 2011

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

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:

  1. Nonbreaking hyphens do not match normal hyphens in FrameMaker's search function.  If I wanted to search and replace all instances of "-my_way" with "-do_it_my_way" because the option name has changed, the search will not match.  I'd need to remember to always use the nonbreaking hyphen metacharacter in the FrameMaker search dialog.
  2. We have an in-house FrameMaker-to-HTML flow which creates an HTML version of our documentation.  This conversion flow converts these nonbreaking hyphens to some other HTML character besides a normal hyphen.  If a user searches for "-my_way" in a browser, it will not match.

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

TOPICS
Feature request

Views

2.9K

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Beginner ,
Feb 01, 2011 Feb 01, 2011

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Chris,
Have you tried setting FM to not allow line breaks after a hyphen? I use this for "/" character and it typically works but I don't have a space before the / and I don't export to html. But it is something you could try.
It's under Format... Document... Text Options.
Brian

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Explorer ,
Mar 04, 2011 Mar 04, 2011

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

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!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Explorer ,
Mar 13, 2011 Mar 13, 2011

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

LATEST

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!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines