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>I've looked in some different style guides and have not yet found an
authoritative answer as to
>whether or not one should use soft hyphens in technical documentation.
It's useful to look for a consensus of practice, but seeking an
'authoritative' answer seems misguided. A cookbook answer is comforting,
but it evades the crucial fact that you, as an individual writer or
editor, are the only real AUTHORity for your own verbal, editorial,
graphical, typesetting, and punctuation practices. Writing and editing
are difficult because everything you 'do' exposes an active choice. To
determine hyphenation standards, you need to judge the loss of clarity
caused by hyphenation against the loss of compactness caused by the lack
of it. No standard fits all situations--except maybe that in technical
writing, you generally seek clarity, simplicity, and efficiency. If you
really take that idea to heart, the rest follows on its own, and the
details hang together because they express a constant purpose. Where you
seem to find a consensus or a convention, it's a result of convergent
evolution among working writers, not the result of a magic, stipulated,
authoritative answer. No one will fault even the wildest hyphenation if
you have a reason for it and it improves clarity.
Steve Pendleton
Technical Writer DeLuxe
Cognex, Acumen Products Group
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."
