hyphen turns into en-dash

[grammatim]

This comes up in linguistics a lot but probably doesn't affect anyone
else.

In Word2003, if you type a leading hyphen (for instance, "you can add -
er or -est to an adjective"), it turns into an en-dash when you reach
the end of the word (space or punctuation). (a) Why would anyone want
it to do this?? (b) How can I make it stop doing it? It's _not_ in
AutoCorrect As You Type, where I thought I found it once before.

(If anything, I'd like a hyphen in that position to automatically turn
into a Nonbreaking Hyphen (Ctrl-Shift-_), so that I don't get a hyphen
stranded at the end of a line and the suffix itself at the beginning
of the next line.)

 

[grammatim]

This comes up in linguistics a lot but probably doesn't affect anyone
else.

In Word2003, if you type a leading hyphen (for instance, "you can add -
er or -est to an adjective"), it turns into an en-dash when you reach
the end of the word (space or punctuation). (a) Why would anyone want
it to do this?? (b) How can I make it stop doing it? It's _not_ in
AutoCorrect As You Type, where I thought I found it once before.

(If anything, I'd like a hyphen in that position to automatically turn
into a Nonbreaking Hyphen (Ctrl-Shift-_), so that I don't get a hyphen
stranded at the end of a line and the suffix itself at the beginning
of the next line.)

Incredibly, the very first thing I did after sending the above message
was to fix a place where the author had -a-, with an en-dash before
the comma. As I typed a hyphen over the en-dash, the leading hyphen
turned into an en-dash -- and a button appeared, and one of the
choices on it was "Don't change hyphen to dash"! And, sure enough,
there was another -a-, a few lines below, and as I fixed its en-dash,
its leading hyphen didn't change to an en-dash.

But is this permanent? Is it registered in normal.dot forever? If I
put " -" (space hyphen) in AutoCorrect As You Type to change to "
-" (space nonbreaking hyphen), will there be some sort of
irreconcilable conflict that will cause Word to crash and my document
to be lost forever?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you look at the Undo list, you'll see this is an AutoFormat item. It's in
the AutoFormat As You Type dialog, and you can disable it completely when
you're typing linguistics docs, or, for isolated occurrences, just press
Ctrl+Z to cancel it when it occurs.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

This comes up in linguistics a lot but probably doesn't affect anyone
else.

In Word2003, if you type a leading hyphen (for instance, "you can add -
er or -est to an adjective"), it turns into an en-dash when you reach
the end of the word (space or punctuation). (a) Why would anyone want
it to do this?? (b) How can I make it stop doing it? It's _not_ in
AutoCorrect As You Type, where I thought I found it once before.

(If anything, I'd like a hyphen in that position to automatically turn
into a Nonbreaking Hyphen (Ctrl-Shift-_), so that I don't get a hyphen
stranded at the end of a line and the suffix itself at the beginning
of the next line.)

Incredibly, the very first thing I did after sending the above message
was to fix a place where the author had -a-, with an en-dash before
the comma. As I typed a hyphen over the en-dash, the leading hyphen
turned into an en-dash -- and a button appeared, and one of the
choices on it was "Don't change hyphen to dash"! And, sure enough,
there was another -a-, a few lines below, and as I fixed its en-dash,
its leading hyphen didn't change to an en-dash.

But is this permanent? Is it registered in normal.dot forever? If I
put " -" (space hyphen) in AutoCorrect As You Type to change to "
-" (space nonbreaking hyphen), will there be some sort of
irreconcilable conflict that will cause Word to crash and my document
to be lost forever?

 

[grammatim]

Are you referring to "Hyphens (--) with dash (em-dash)"? Indeed I find
that it's now unchecked, but that's not what I was typing, nor what I
was getting! (I don't need that anyway, because I always type my en-
and em-dashes with Ctrl-Minus and Ctrl-Alt-Minus.)

I must say, I have no idea what "Long vowel sounds with dash" means.

Ctrl-Z isn't practical because (first) one would have to notice that
the change had happened and (second) one would have to back up lots of
letters to get back to where it did the automatic change.

Thank you; I'll feel comfortable putting the nonbreaking hyphen into
AutoCorrect As You Type.

 

[grammatim]

Didn't work -- I can't get nonbreaking hyphen into the AutoCorrect
page: not by typing Ctrl-Shift-_, nor by Pasting it from the
clipboard, nor by typing ^~, its wildcard symbol.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Yes, that's the one. The label is a bit of an abbreviation. What it actually
does is this:

* Converts two or three hyphens not preceded or followed by spaces to an em
dash.

* Converts one or two hyphens preceded and followed by spaces to an en dash.

* Various other conversions depending on spaces before/after that I don't
have the patience to test and elaborate on at the moment, but what you're
seeing is the result of one of them.

I also have shortcuts for en and em dashes, so I probably wouldn't miss this
feature if it were turned off, though I do leave it on (it's especially
handy in AutoFormat--as opposed to AutoFormat As You Type--for formatting
existing text).

You can save words joined by nonbreaking spaces or hyphens as *formatted*
AutoCorrect entries; I don't know whether you can save the hyphen alone that
way or not.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Are you referring to "Hyphens (--) with dash (em-dash)"? Indeed I find
that it's now unchecked, but that's not what I was typing, nor what I
was getting! (I don't need that anyway, because I always type my en-
and em-dashes with Ctrl-Minus and Ctrl-Alt-Minus.)

I must say, I have no idea what "Long vowel sounds with dash" means.

Ctrl-Z isn't practical because (first) one would have to notice that
the change had happened and (second) one would have to back up lots of
letters to get back to where it did the automatic change.

Thank you; I'll feel comfortable putting the nonbreaking hyphen into
AutoCorrect As You Type.

 

[grammatim]

Ok, I'll look for "formatted AutoCorrect entries" -- but what is "Long
vowel sounds with dash"?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Where are you seeing that? It sounds like a description of vowels with a
macron over them (Unicode characters found in the Latin Extended-A character
subset), but I've never seen this label before. Is it on the AutoCorrect
Options button? I've just enabled that button, but I'm not seeing that on
the menu when the dash fires.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Ok, I'll look for "formatted AutoCorrect entries" -- but what is "Long
vowel sounds with dash"?

 

[Don]

If you look at the Undo list, you'll see this is an AutoFormat item.
It's in the AutoFormat As You Type dialog, and you can disable it
completely when you're typing linguistics docs, or, for isolated
occurrences, just press Ctrl+Z to cancel it when it occurs.

Suzanne,
While your here. . .

I archive/didgitze many documents/articles. Initially this is all done
through WordPad and saved as RTF files.

Later when opening these files (clicking) the file association by
default is Word, which I'm not looking to change or even address.

Rather, my problem is later upon opening these files to create web pages.
The text is copied and pasted from withim Word to either Notepad or an
HTML tool.
The problem that occurrs is that all the standard dashes/hyphens are
turned in to question marks (requiring additional editing).
The em-dashes which are used frequently in these materials are turned
into dashes.

Might you suggest a possible solution that would retain the original
punctuation upon conversion?

Thanks in advance.

 

[grammatim]

On the AutoFormat panel (the one we've been talking about), directly
below the line for "Hyphens (-) with dash (-)." I even tried "Online
Help" (and found where you'd quoted the description of the latter
from), and there's nothing there.

(Are there subversions of Word2003 that I could identify somehow?)

I don't know what the AutoCorrect Options button does (or where it
would appear if I enabled it).

I made my own shortcut keys for macron-letters (since I need them all
the time) as well as most of the other accented letters. (Though I
haven't gotten around to the Vietnamese set yet.)

 

[grammatim]

I just realized what it may be!! Go enable Japanese in your Windows
installation, and see if the line doesn't appear! (All sorts of extra
stuff shows up in Word because of Japanese -- such as a whole third
tab in Format > Paragraph. Is there a "Vertical Text Box" icon on the
Drawing toolbar in a normal installation?) There are two ways of
writing a long vowel in Japanese kana (syllable-letters): either by
writing the vowel-letter twice, or by a horizontal stroke.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

No, I'm afraid I don't know anything about that. Perhaps someone else will.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I was going to suggest that this was probably a result of enabling some
other language option. Since I don't have much use for it, I won't enable
this, but I will mention it to my brother who lives and teaches in Japan and
is in the process of retyping the Japanese history textbook he created for
his classes. In the original version, created some 20-odd years ago, he put
the macrons in with pen, but this time (having seen that there was a way to
do it in Word, since I do it when addressing letters to him), he finally got
around to asking me how to do it and intends to do this version "right." <g>

It would be handy to have something like this (or even Word's keyboard
shortcuts) in FrontPage. It was painful to create pages for
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/Japan/Japan.htm, and in fact, many of them were
written in Word and then carefully cut and pasted into FP (and reformatted
there to remove Word's garbage).

As for the AutoCorrect Options button, when enabled, it generates a tiny
little button (almost invisible) when you mouse over a recent
AutoCorrect/AutoFormat. If you hover, it opens to a larger button with an
arrow. Click on the arrow to get a menu of options. The options are so
limited that the button is really almost useless, but one of the options is
"stop doing whatever you just did," which changes the setting in the
AutoFormat As You Type dialog.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

I just realized what it may be!! Go enable Japanese in your Windows
installation, and see if the line doesn't appear! (All sorts of extra
stuff shows up in Word because of Japanese -- such as a whole third
tab in Format > Paragraph. Is there a "Vertical Text Box" icon on the
Drawing toolbar in a normal installation?) There are two ways of
writing a long vowel in Japanese kana (syllable-letters): either by
writing the vowel-letter twice, or by a horizontal stroke.

 

[grammatim]

I don't see anything on the front page or a couple of pages I looked
at that has either Japanese script (that's what the long vowel/dash
thing refers to) or Japanese in "romaji" (roman-alphabet
transliteration), where macrons would be used. (Actually, the O in
"Osaka" would have one.) Thanks for explaining the AutoFormat button
-- as long as it stays tiny, it might occasionally be useful, but how
can I turn off the giant button that appears whenever I Paste text (or
even drag and drop/copy) -- or better, can it be changed to a tiny
almost-invisible button like the AutoFormat one you describe, since it
blocks adjacent text?

Recently -- and only recently -- I've been seeing a heavy underline
under anything that was AutoFormatted if I happen to hover near it
shortly after. Did I do something to cause that to start appearing?

Speaking of drag & drop, it's annoying that I can't drag anything if
any working windows (Find, X-ref) are open. (But the Styles &
Formatting pane doesn't bother it.)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Starting at the end, I believe the "heavy underline" you're seeing is the
"tiny button" I mentioned. The Paste Options button can be disabled on the
Edit tab of Tools | Options.

As for dragging and dropping (and other text editing), some dialog boxes are
"modal" and some are "modeless." I never remember which is which, but one
allows you to "step out" of the dialog and perform other actions, while the
other doesn't. Annoyingly, I can move the insertion point while the Insert |
Cross-reference dialog is open, but then when I click back in it, the
previously selected item is not active, and I have to scroll down to it all
over again. If you're just using Find (not Replace), you can close the
dialog and use the Browse Arrows to Find Next/Find Previous. And yes, task
panes are designed to be able to be left open--one good thing about them.

As for my Web pages, the Attractions pages use more romaji, and of course
the http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/Japan/Sidebars/Language.htm page is heavy on
it (though probably inconsistent in treatment, given the difficulties; I see
I have "romaji" with and without macron in a single paragraph <sigh>). I
made a conscious decision not to use macrons on uppercase.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

I don't see anything on the front page or a couple of pages I looked
at that has either Japanese script (that's what the long vowel/dash
thing refers to) or Japanese in "romaji" (roman-alphabet
transliteration), where macrons would be used. (Actually, the O in
"Osaka" would have one.) Thanks for explaining the AutoFormat button
-- as long as it stays tiny, it might occasionally be useful, but how
can I turn off the giant button that appears whenever I Paste text (or
even drag and drop/copy) -- or better, can it be changed to a tiny
almost-invisible button like the AutoFormat one you describe, since it
blocks adjacent text?

Recently -- and only recently -- I've been seeing a heavy underline
under anything that was AutoFormatted if I happen to hover near it
shortly after. Did I do something to cause that to start appearing?

Speaking of drag & drop, it's annoying that I can't drag anything if
any working windows (Find, X-ref) are open. (But the Styles &
Formatting pane doesn't bother it.)

 

[grammatim]

That's a pretty good essay on Japanese (language and) writing. It's ok
to leave the accents off capital letters in French, but not in
Japanese!

Have you noticed that you can insert any number of cross references if
you don't go back into your document in between? It's useful for
things like "(12)-(63)," since you can even scroll around in the Xref
window. I then go back to the document and put in the en-dash (if you
arrow backward across the second one, go one press beyond the left
edge of the gray-highlighted item: the cursor won't move, but it'll be
out of the cross reference).

When going back to the cross reference window that you've left open,
don't click directly on the scroll bar, or it'll be disabled until the
window is closed and opened again, and then you can only navigate by
selecting something in the window and using the mouse wheel (or the up
and down arrow keys).

After global things like Smart Quotes and getting rid of double spaces
and such when starting on a new document (authors think they're still
using typewriters), I mostly use Find-Replace to change single quotes
to double quotes (different style manuals have different conventions
for different kinds of quoted material), so it's convenient to keep it
open and do a Replace All within a selection. It's an annoyance that
the Browse Arrows won't find something until it's been found once by
the Find window -- especially since I usually want to find something
backward, to check how I dealt with it 25 pages earlier!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Although you can choose to search backward from the Find window, you have to
expand the window and make a specific selection to do it; like you, I
usually find it easier to click Find Next, close the dialog, and then use
the Previous Find/Go To arrow to go back.

I rarely need to insert more than one cross-reference in the same place, but
that's good info. ISTR that one of the things on the MVP Wish List was to
make that dialog modal/modeless (whichever it is that means you can keep it
open while you work). So far, it hasn't happened.

I guess I hadn't been much aware of macrons on capital letters in Japanese
because there are so few proper nouns that begin with vowels. The accenting
is haphazard mostly because most of my sources had no accents; when I ran
across one that did, I'd go back and put accents on those words where I ran
across them, but obviously the results are highly inconsistent.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

That's a pretty good essay on Japanese (language and) writing. It's ok
to leave the accents off capital letters in French, but not in
Japanese!

Have you noticed that you can insert any number of cross references if
you don't go back into your document in between? It's useful for
things like "(12)-(63)," since you can even scroll around in the Xref
window. I then go back to the document and put in the en-dash (if you
arrow backward across the second one, go one press beyond the left
edge of the gray-highlighted item: the cursor won't move, but it'll be
out of the cross reference).

When going back to the cross reference window that you've left open,
don't click directly on the scroll bar, or it'll be disabled until the
window is closed and opened again, and then you can only navigate by
selecting something in the window and using the mouse wheel (or the up
and down arrow keys).

After global things like Smart Quotes and getting rid of double spaces
and such when starting on a new document (authors think they're still
using typewriters), I mostly use Find-Replace to change single quotes
to double quotes (different style manuals have different conventions
for different kinds of quoted material), so it's convenient to keep it
open and do a Replace All within a selection. It's an annoyance that
the Browse Arrows won't find something until it's been found once by
the Find window -- especially since I usually want to find something
backward, to check how I dealt with it 25 pages earlier!

 

[grammatim]

ISTR that one of the things on the MVP Wish List was to
make that dialog modal/modeless (whichever it is that means you can keep it
open while you work). So far, it hasn't happened.

_All_ dialog windows!

How about: allowing Comments in footnotes?

And not having to do every global find/replace twice, once for the
text and once for the footnotes?

I guess I hadn't been much aware of macrons on capital letters in Japanese
because there are so few proper nouns that begin with vowels. The accenting
is haphazard mostly because most of my sources had no accents; when I ran
across one that did, I'd go back and put accents on those words where I ran
across them, but obviously the results are highly inconsistent.

All you have to do is learn Japanese!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I believe if you don't interrupt the Replace All, it will do the footnotes
after the document body, and it will Find in the footnotes when it's done
with the main body. But this can still be frustrating. I'm currently working
on a 600-page document with 470 footnotes. It's infuriating to be using Find
and have it (after searching the main document) jump into the footnotes, and
then, when I try to return to the previous Find, be told that Word can't
find any other occurrences in the footnotes. I have to be careful to
remember to move the IP back to the main document story before using Find
again.

Learning Japanese is one of the many things I aim to do in my next life!

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

ISTR that one of the things on the MVP Wish List was to
make that dialog modal/modeless (whichever it is that means you can keep
it
open while you work). So far, it hasn't happened.

_All_ dialog windows!

How about: allowing Comments in footnotes?

And not having to do every global find/replace twice, once for the
text and once for the footnotes?

I guess I hadn't been much aware of macrons on capital letters in Japanese
because there are so few proper nouns that begin with vowels. The
accenting
is haphazard mostly because most of my sources had no accents; when I ran
across one that did, I'd go back and put accents on those words where I
ran
across them, but obviously the results are highly inconsistent.

All you have to do is learn Japanese!