Breaking long words with "Soft Hyphens"

The Problem

When you have long words, they can sometimes cause layout issues or “break” out of their containing boxes.

For example the longest place name in the world (from right here in Aotearoa):

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu

The solution

A good way to deal with this is to insert a “soft hyphen” into the word. This is an invisible character that suggests to the website that this would be a good place to include a hyphen and break the word.

Here’s the place name again with several soft hyphens added:
Taumatawhakatangi­hangakoauauo­tamateaturipuka­kapikimaunga­horonukupokai­whenuakitanatahu

As you resize the screen, you may see more or less hyphens, depending on the available space.

Sounds great! How do I add them?

Here is the unicode page where you can find out how to add it or copy the soft hyphen to your clipboard ready to place in.
https://unicode-explorer.com/c/00AD

There are several ways you can add them:

• Copy the character to your clipboard from the website above and then paste it in where you need it

• Windows: Ctrl + Shift + - (hyphen/minus sign)

• Mac: Character Viewer (Edit > Emoji & Symbols)

  • You’ll want to expand the viewer so you can search more easily

The only trick is that they are invisible, so after you’ve added them in, you can’t see them. That means you want to be careful where you place them to avoid unexpected results.

Removing formatting in the text editor toolbar won’t remove them as they are actual text characters, not formatting applied to the content.