Hyphenation dictionary errors

[Dugald]

I'm seeing a strange, intermittent error in Word 2003 on Windows XP. We have
bilingual documents in a tabular format with English on the left, French on
the right.
Content is fully justified and automatic hyphenation is used on all our
files with the English text set to the English-Canadian dictionary and the
French text set to the French-Canadian dictionary. Most of the time
everything works as expected however some times, the hyphenation is turned
off on the French text even though the Tools...Language...Hyphenation menu
clearly shows that the text is set to "Automatically Hyphenate Document".
Some times a dialogue box is shown to the user before this happens with an
error message stating that "The hyphenation dictionary c:\Program
files\..proof\mshy3fr.lex" cannot be found, but a search of the users hard
drive always reveals that the file IS present in the specified location.
Other times the hyphenation is turned off suddenly but the user receives no
error message or warning of any kind (except for the sudden increase in
whitespace in the French text).

Closing and opening the file does not turn the hyphenation back on, however
if we exit Word completely and then reopen the file, the hyphenation does
reappear.

Has anyone seen this kind of behaviour before? Any ideas about why this
problem would only occur intermittently? It has been seen to happen on
multiple machines, with files of all different sizes (from a single page to
50 to 60 pages) but the error can't be reproduced on the same file on the
same machine (as mentioned above, simply exiting and re-launching Word is the
method we use for fixing the problem right now).

 

[Terry Farrell]

I'd check that the versions of the mshy3fr.lex are correct on these
computers in case something has gone wrong with an update. Then try cleaning
out all the users' temp folders. With all applications closed, the temp
folders should be empty but are probably full of abandoned temp files.

Finally, it is possible that Word has lost the connection to the printer and
is thus unable to interrogate the printer driver to calculate layout
parameters. Closing Word and reopening it is reestablishing its connection
with its default printer.

 

[Dugald]

Thanks for the information Terry.
Your first suggestions don't seem to be related to our problem: the
mshy3fr.lex files are the same on all machines and Word hyphenates French
text correctly when it hyphenates it at all; it's just that on certain
occasions the hyphenation gets turned off completely. Also we automatically
empty the users temp folders in an autologoff script.

In your second paragraph though you mention that this problem might be
related to Word losing its connection to the default printer. This does
sound like it might be the source of our problem but there were two questions
I had about this:
1) Our setup does not include the "use printer metrics to lay out document"
setting; I had thought that in this case Word would not need to access the
printer driver in order to perform things like hyphenation since its Word's
internal layout parameters that are being used.
2) Our users can always print the documents even after the hyphenation has
suddenly been turned off on their file. Would this mean that your
explanation cannot be the cause of our problem since the printer is clearly
still accessible to Word, or could some problem with accessing the printer
make it so that hyphenation is impossible, but the file can still be printed
out?

This second issue is actually what made this issue such a great problem for
us: in between stages in the quality assurance process, users were making
changes requested by the editing team and then printing out their files and
the editors would notice in the hard copy that the line breaks had all
suddenly changed because Word was no longer inserting any hyphens in the file.

Dugald

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Text that is formatted as "Do not check spelling or grammar" will not be
hyphenated, either.

 

[Dugald]

Yes, I initially thought that might be the problem, but sadly it was not the
case. The hyphenation is turned off for all the French text in the file and
none of the paragraphs are specified as "Do not check spelling or grammar".

To restore hyphenation our users:
1) save any changes in the file
2) exit Word
3) reopen the file
and the hyphenation is magically restored. This seems to indicate that the
problem is not within the file itself (at least not directly) but I can't
figure out exactly what causes it to occur. So far we have not been able to
come up with a set of steps that will always produce the problem in a
particular file.