Mac Forum / Applications / Word / December 2006

I saw a query that was probably about the same problem but couldn't
post a reply because it was too old.

Anyway, others must have encountered this: In some documents, at
certainly places in the document, running manual hyphenation gives the
following error:

"A hyphenation error occurred. Word is ending the current session."

Which documents and which paragraphs trigger the error are replicable,
but for a long time I couldn't figure out what they all had in common.
Today I got fed up and did some careful testing. What I came up with is
this:

First of all, it's not the contents of the paragraph per se that
trigger the error (which made it so hard to track down), rather it's
*where Word is trying to insert the hyphen* that matters. (So if you
take a paragraph that's causing this error, and change the margins so
the lines break at different places, the error typically goes away.)

As for the actual sequence of characters that triggers the error, based
on the two cases that occur in my documents I believe the fatal pattern
is a single letter followed by a certain set of punctuation marks (or
nonalphanumeric characters more generally). Here are my examples:

If a line in the middle of a paragraph begins with

F(130)

and the previous line has too much space in it, such that Word would
like to hyphenate this "word" as

F-(130)

(which we can tell by the fact that if you manually insert an optional
hyphen in this position it will indeed pop the F up onto the previous
line)

then you get the error: the crucial part seems to be the "F(" sequence.

Likewise I get the error on a line beginning with

e.g.

or

(e.g.

or

e. g.  [where the space is nonbreaking]

apparently because Word is trying to create "e-."

If I change the above patterns simply by adding a second letter, i.e.

PF(130)
or
ee.g.

the error goes away, even though there is verifiably enough space to
shift both letters back to the previous line.

I won't try to guess why this is happening--that's Microsoft's job! But
I would be curious if others can replicate or refine the pattern.

I'm running Word 2004 version 11.3 under OS 10.3.9, but I'm pretty I
was seeing this bug in earlier versions too.

     Carson