This element specifies the hyphenation zone which shall be used when automatically or manually hyphenating the contents of this document. The hyphenation zone is the amount of whitespace which may be left at the end of a line (or added to justified lines) before hyphenation should be attempted on the next word in the document (in order to reduce the amount of whitespace on the line). A smaller hyphenation zone should reduce the raggedness of the right edge of a given document's body text, as more words will be hyphenated. Conversely, a larger hyphenation zone should increase the raggedness of the right edge of a given document's text, as fewer words will be hyphenated.

If this element is omitted, then a default hyphenation zone of 360 twentieths of a point (0.25") shall be applied when performing hyphenation on this document.

[Example: Consider the images below illustrating a paragraph of text in a WordprocessingML document which was automatically hyphenated with the default hyphenation zone:

If document shall instead be hyphenated using a hyphenation zone of one-half of an inch, that requirement would be specified using the following WordprocessingML in the document settings:

<w:hyphenationZone w:val="720" />

The resulting output would only hyphenate words when the remaining line whitespace was less than half an inch, and would look like the following:

The hyphenationZone element has its val attribute equal to 720, therefore lines in the document are hyphenated when the remaining line spacing is less than 72o twentieths of a point (0.5"), resulting in fewer hyphens. end example]

Parent Elements

settings (§2.15.1.78)

Attributes

Description

val (Measurement in Twentieths of a Point)

Specifies a positive measurement value, specified in twentieths of a point. This value is interpreted based on the context of the parent XML element.

[Example: Consider the following WordprocessingML element with a val attribute containing a positive measurement in twentieths of a point:

<w:… w:val="720" />

The val attribute has a value of 720, specifying that this measurement value is 720 twentieths of a point (0.5"). This value is interpreted by the parent element as needed. end example]

The possible values for this attribute are defined by the ST_TwipsMeasure simple type (§2.18.105).

The following XML Schema fragment defines the contents of this element:

</complexType>