when one uses - in a word, is it supposed to be a possible wrap position? why word won't take this to have a good balance between lines?

or i miss some options?

I am not quite following your question. Can you please precise it?

What exactly do you want with dashes? If you want text after to be aligned, play with the ruler and tabs.

mike

thanks mike. my question is like when you have a sentence like this:

hardware-based solutions are blah blah ...

when the word "hardware-based" happens to position at the border of a line, the word will simply put the whole word to the second line and make the first line a little sparse.

in my opinion, the dash or hyphen between "hardware" and "based" is a possible wrap position. why doesn't ms word utilize such dashes and hyphens.

What kind of MS Word are using?
Also, what kind of alignment do you have? Justified or to the left?

I tried it on MS Word 2002 and MS Word 2007 and it actually works as you wish. What actually might happen to you is that your words just "do not" fit to be split.

mike