Originally Posted by Hitch
Nope. I suck.
Basically, all I meant is:
When you are typing along in a word-processor, the only time you will yourself, key the hyphen character, is if you are using a word like, well, word-processor. Or stay-at-home. Etc. You don't type along, get to the end of the line and then type a hyphen mid-word because you ran out of room. Right?
Right. The hyphens that you type, are hard hyphens. They won't disappear, when you change the margins, or anything else. They're permanent. Part of the manuscript, no matter what.
But, in Word or other word processors, if you have a typed document, and the line runs out of line, a word will be hyphenated. e.g., hyphen-ated. You didn't type it--but it appears. That's a hyphen created by the software. If you move the word, or change your margins, it disappears. That's a soft hyphen. It only exists when needed, and doesn't when it oughtn't be. It's software-created, not typed by humans.
Thus, I was kvetching because somehow, someway, hard hyphens appeared in this woman's book. Dunno how. But some poor schmuck will have to clean them up, because you can't leave them. You can't just S&R (search and replace) because, see above, the type of hard-hyphens you need. Yes, there are some searches you can do, using regex (Search and replace in code, basically) that can eliminate some of the tedium--but not much. And trust me--you can't ask the clients to do that; they'll never figure it out.
That's why I was bitching.
Hitch
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