Unicode Explained

The reason why Unicode 4 does not list the soft hyphen as a hyphen is that the standard

tries to clarify its meaning: “it marks a position for hyphenation, rather than being itself

a hyphen character.”

Though supported by some software, the soft hyphen does not work reliably across

programs. In addition to the MS Word specialty discussed below, the soft hyphen is

treated as a normal hyphen by various programs, including some web browsers.

MS Word specialties

Microsoft Word has an Insert → Symbol function, which was described in Chapter 2.

It contains a quick menu for some commonly used characters: “Special Characters.”

Some entries there are rather misleading:

• “Nonbreaking Hyphen” (often with shortcut Ctrl-Shift--) does not insert the Uni-

code character non-breaking hyphen U+2011 but instead the control character

U+001E. Word displays it as a hyphen and does not break a line after it. If the

document is saved as plain text, Word turns the control character to a hyphen-

minus. If you cut and paste text, the character turns into a question mark, ?.

• “Optional Hyphen” (often with shortcut Ctrl--) does not insert the Unicode char-

acter soft hyphen U+00AD. Instead, it inserts the control character U+001F, which

is interpreted by Word as indicating a possible hyphenation point. This informa-

tion is usually lost when saving in other formats or when cutting and pasting.

However, when saving data ...