[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you look at the Undo list, you'll see this is an AutoFormat item. It's in
the AutoFormat As You Type dialog, and you can disable it completely when
you're typing linguistics docs, or, for isolated occurrences, just press
Ctrl+Z to cancel it when it occurs.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"grammatim" wrote in message
...
On Dec 28, 4:28 pm, grammatim wrote:
This comes up in linguistics a lot but probably doesn't affect anyone
else.

In Word2003, if you type a leading hyphen (for instance, "you can add -
er or -est to an adjective"), it turns into an en-dash when you reach
the end of the word (space or punctuation). (a) Why would anyone want
it to do this?? (b) How can I make it stop doing it? It's _not_ in
AutoCorrect As You Type, where I thought I found it once before.

(If anything, I'd like a hyphen in that position to automatically turn
into a Nonbreaking Hyphen (Ctrl-Shift-_), so that I don't get a hyphen
stranded at the end of a line and the suffix itself at the beginning
of the next line.)

Incredibly, the very first thing I did after sending the above message
was to fix a place where the author had -a-, with an en-dash before
the comma. As I typed a hyphen over the en-dash, the leading hyphen
turned into an en-dash -- and a button appeared, and one of the
choices on it was "Don't change hyphen to dash"! And, sure enough,
there was another -a-, a few lines below, and as I fixed its en-dash,
its leading hyphen didn't change to an en-dash.

But is this permanent? Is it registered in normal.dot forever? If I
put " -" (space hyphen) in AutoCorrect As You Type to change to "
-" (space nonbreaking hyphen), will there be some sort of
irreconcilable conflict that will cause Word to crash and my document
to be lost forever?