Badly Hyphenated Words (across a page break, etc.)

A discretionary hyphen lets you choose where to hyphenate a word in Indesign. If you add it at the beginning or end of the word, Indesign will get rid of the hyphen in the word.

Make a discretionary hyphen with the shortcut
command shift hyphen.

You can prevent many of these in the hyphenation settings in Indesign. Hyphenation settings are in the menu found at the bottom right of the Character/Paragraph control bar. Or in the menu in the Paragraph palette.

There, you can turn off hyphenating across columns and hyphenating the last word of a paragraph. (see the image below)

Leftover lines

Increase or decrease letterspacing in the affected paragraph or a paragraph immediately above it.

You don’t want the different spacing of the text to show. So, you probably shouldn’t go over 15 or below -15 for the Tracking.

Short lines

For these, you might also increase or decrease letterspacing, but for a few words preceding the affected word.

You can also find a hyphenated word in the same paragraph as the affected line and add a discretionary hyphen (command shift hyphen) to get rid of the hyphen and get Indesign to reflow the text in the paragraph.