What is meant by hard hyphen and soft hyphen?

Answer 1

When flowing digital text, it is sometimes preferable to break a word in half so that it continues on another line rather than moving the entire word to the next line. Since it is difficult for a computer program to automatically make good decisions on when to hyphenate a word, the concept of a soft hyphen was introduced to allow manual specification of a place where a hyphenated break was allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text was later reflowed. In contrast, a hyphen that is always displayed and printed is called a hard hyphen (though some use this term to refer to a non-breaking hyphen). Soft hyphens are most useful when the width of the column where the text is displayed is very narrow, because longer words in a sentence tend to force a line break in the text, leaving a lot of white space at the end of the line. By inserting soft hyphens into the text at the positions where hyphenation may occur, the text can flow better into columns leaving less remaining white space at the end of the lines.