WP Soft Hyphen

Soft hyphen () button for the Gutenberg formatting toolbar

by Dutch Portfolio · github.com/joostadams/wp-soft-hyphen · website

★ 0stars

Install

Download source zip No release zip yet

This is the repository archive. It installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow.

Install straight from GitHub with WP-CLI:

wp plugin install https://github.com/joostadams/wp-soft-hyphen/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

Updates itself. It ships its own updater (Plugin Update Checker), so new versions appear under Dashboard → Updates.

Readme github.com/joostadams/wp-soft-hyphen ↗

Adds a soft hyphen () button to the Gutenberg formatting toolbar, so you can control word breaks directly in the editor — no switching to the HTML view.

A soft hyphen is invisible unless the browser needs to break the word at that position, where it renders as a regular hyphen. Perfect for long Dutch compound words in narrow columns and headings.

Usage

Select text in any RichText-based block (paragraph, heading, button, …).
Place the caret where the word may break.
Open the toolbar ⌄ (more) dropdown and choose Soft hyphen, or press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+-.

The character is saved as a real U+00AD character in the post content, which is equivalent to  in HTML.

Installation

Download the latest release zip.
Upload via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
Activate. Done — no settings.

Automatic updates

The plugin ships with plugin-update-checker. Every WordPress installation running this plugin checks this GitHub repository for new releases and offers the update on the normal Plugins screen.

Release checklist for maintainers:

Bump Version in wp-soft-hyphen.php (and WP_SOFT_HYPHEN_VERSION).
Commit, tag vX.Y.Z, push.
Create a GitHub release for the tag and attach wp-soft-hyphen.zip (the plugin folder, zipped) as a release asset.

Requirements

WordPress 6.0+
PHP 7.4+

License

GPL-2.0-or-later.