Soft hyphenation in Pages

Most word processors automatically hyphenate words that don’t fit completely at the end of a line.
For example, the word “character” might automatically be split as: “char-acter”

This automatic feature ensures your text flows smoothly even when words move within a paragraph as you edit it. To do this, word processors rely on hyphenation rules or built-in dictionaries that determine where a word can be split — for example, “char-ac-ter.”

When automatic hyphenation goes wrong

Automatic hyphenation usually works well — especially in Apple Pages.
However, it can struggle in certain situations, such as:

• Words in multiple languages within the same paragraph
• Proper names or brand names that aren’t in the dictionary

For instance, take this sentence:

“… a character (German: Zeichen) is …”

If the word “Zeichen” appears at the end of a line, Pages might apply English hyphenation rules and split it incorrectly:

a character (German: Ze-ichen) is …

According to German rules, it should instead be: Zei-chen

Why not just type a dash?

You might think of manually inserting a hyphen or dash, but that causes problems later.
If you edit the paragraph and the word moves to a different line, you’ll end up with a visible hyphen in the middle of a line (like Zei-chen), which looks incorrect.

Turning off hyphenation for the entire paragraph isn’t ideal either, as it affects the whole layout.

The better way: use a soft hyphen

Many word processors, like Microsoft Word, include a feature called a soft hyphen.
A soft hyphen is invisible unless the word needs to be split at the end of a line.
When that happens, it automatically appears as a regular hyphen.

Unfortunately, Pages doesn’t have a direct way to insert soft hyphens, but PopChar can help!

Inserting a soft hyphen with PopChar

The soft hyphen is actually a Unicode character called “SOFT HYPHEN” (code point 173).
It works exactly like Word’s soft hyphen but you can’t type it directly from most keyboards.

Here’s how to insert it with PopChar:

1. Open PopChar.
2. In the “Latin-1 Supplement” section, find the “Soft Hyphen” character — it appears just before the registered sign (®).

Tip: You can also search for “soft hyphen” using the PopChar search field.

1. Click the soft hyphen character to insert it where your text cursor is.
2. The character appears as an empty rectangle in PopChar because it’s invisible in normal text.

If you use it often, you can add it to your Favorites by right-clicking (or Ctrl-clicking) and selecting “Add to Favorites.”

Even though Pages doesn’t offer a built-in command for soft hyphens, it recognizes and handles the character correctly when it’s present.

Using soft hyphens in HTML

If you’re writing web pages, you can also insert a soft hyphen as an HTML entity:

“­”

Of course, you can type that manually, but PopChar can insert it for you without needing to remember the code.