Finale Forum

Does Finale have a "non-breaking hyphen"? I ask because Dan Kreider is suggesting using one for Finale users in conjunction with his MusAnalysis font.

https://notat.io/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=742

I see there is a "hard hyphen" in the Lyrics tool Text area but don't know the difference between a hard and a non-breaking hyphen.

In Windows, it appears to be the same character. I'm not sure about Mac. I believe there was a recent discussion on this.

Zuill

You can find the non-breaking hyphen in Unicode.

If you use Finale’s dialog box Symbol Selection, then you can find the non-breaking hyphen in character slot #1292.

Thanks Peter. Is there an easy way to assign that to a key binding in Finale?

If not, I think the easiest solution will be to swap out the hyphen or another character in the analysis font so there's no conflict with the hyphen advancing the lyric entry.

dankreider wrote: ↑

Tue May 11, 2021 8:07 pm

Thanks Peter. Is there an easy way to assign that to a key binding in Finale? …

Dan,

I can see from your Forum Profile that you are using Windows.

I am a Mac user, and I am afraid I can not be of much help regarding key bindings in Windows Finale.

Hopefully a Windows user will step in here with an answer for you.

Peter Thomsen wrote: ↑

Tue May 11, 2021 7:58 pm

You can find the non-breaking hyphen in Unicode.

If you use Finale’s dialog box Symbol Selection, then you can find the non-breaking hyphen in character slot #1292.

Thanks for that, Peter. I wonder if the SMuFL will include this, when they adopt the standard as promised in F27.

Thanks all. I think I'm just going to re-map this sort of thing to a different character entirely.

Looking back at past notes on this:

Finale uses U+2010 as the "hard hyphen" character, which is the alternative 'hyphen' glyph in Unicode. However, it's quite a lottery whether a font has this glyph or not. Many fonts, including plenty of "Std" OTF faces, do not.
(Most fonts will have another identical hyphen glyph at U+00AD, but this is reserved to distinguish user-generated hyphens from computer-set hyphenation.)

However, the option in Preferences > Edit "Substitute Font for Missing Unicode Characters" switches the glyph, if missing from the font, to something in the "8-bit" range, and that's probably why you get an N-dash. Turning off the option should mean you just get a missing glyph symbol.

SMuFL does have glyphs for breaking and non-breaking hyphens, but whether an app uses those (from the Music font, rather than lyrics Text font) is up to the app.

Yes, I found it much easier to just map this function to a character like the period instead of the hyphen.

Dorico pulls the hyphen automatically using Alt-hyphen, but Finale does not.