How to turn off hyphenations in pages documents.

By Andrew90, 14 July, 2021

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi all,
Early last year, I had difficulty reading documents because every so often, words would be split across two lines. Some words would wrap to the next line and this would make reading very difficult.
For example:
'The sargent wanted rev
enge for war crimes.'
When the sentence should have read:
'the sargent wanted revenge for war crimes.'
I posted a forum topic about this early in 2020
https://www.applevis.com/forum/macos-mac-apps/issues-pages-mac

I had difficulty following the instructions given. I asked a couple of times for more specific instructions to be given because I was unable to find certain options or controls, this was not done and I eventually got my sighted sister to assist me.
Recently, I somehow discovered how to do this myself and have written out instructions below if anyone is interested.
Please share with others that may be interested.

For those that may be new to voiceOver, when I say voiceover keys (VO) that means hold down and press the control key and the option key together with other keys such as left or right arrow.

To turn off hyphenation and stop word wrapping to the next line, in pages, do the following.
1. Navigate to and open your document.
2. Once the document is opened, you will most likely have focus placed on the document layout area.
3. press VO left arrow 4 times or until you hear toolbar.
4. Press VO, Shift, down arrow to interact with the toolbar.
5. Press VO right arrow 12 times or until you hear document radio button.
6. Press VO space to select this radio button, then press VO, shift, up arrow to stop interacting with the toolbar.
7. Press VO right arrow 6 times or until you hear voiceover say Formatter group
8. Press VO, shift, down arrow to interact with the formatter group.
9. Press VO right arrow 3 times or until you hear voiceover say document formatter, scroll area.
10. Interact with this by pressing VO, shift, down arrow.
11. Press VO, function, right arrow to jump to the far right of the options.
12. Press vo left arrow once to get to the hyphenation checkbox.
13. Press VO space to uncheck it.
14. You should now uninteract with the formatter and navigate back to the document layout area and body and be able to read the document with no more hyphenation putting words on the next line. Hope this helps.

Options

Comments

By Andrew90 on Thursday, July 29, 2021 - 14:38

If anyone found these instructions helpful, Feel free to let me know. :)

By Kevin Shaw on Thursday, July 29, 2021 - 14:38

Hi. I just posted two guides to Pages in the Guides section on AppleVis and was going to tackle hyphenation and document layout in another one. Great minds think alike! There is another way to do this through the Text Formatter under the Layout tab for specific paragraphs. Hyphenation looks nice visually, but can be frustrating to read with a screenreader. This is why I recommend formatting documents last.