How to break line at file or web URL in Microsoft Word 2007

Question

I'm writing an administration guide for a software package and I have to write the name of several config files, including their full path, something like that:

In order to do blah, blah, blah, you should open the file /usr/JBoss-4.2.3.GA/server/default/deploy/jboss-web.deployer/server.xml to check that parameter keystoreFile equals to /usr/JBoss-4.2.3.GA/server/default/deploy/jboss-web.deployer/conf/SERVER_NAME.pfx

I have a problem with Microsoft Word 2007 and the way it handles Justification and hyphenation. It doesn't break lines in these long URLs unless it's forced to, prefering to add huge spaces before or after, as in

LONG_URL_OF_FILE_1
and            its
LONG_NAME_OF_PARAM
ETER

Is there a way to force some kind on hyphenation on '/', '.' and '_' characters?

Answer 1

You can manually break the line by inserting a manual line break:

• Ribbon->Page Layout->Page Setup->Breaks->Line break (Office 2007, similar in 2010), OR
• Press Shift+Enter

You alternatively could add a hyphen or space where you want the line to break, and Word will break the line for you, assuming you haven't changed the hyphenation settings too much.

So you can do at least do it manually; however, I have the same problem and I'd like Word to do it automatically, without my intervention. I'm trying to split URLs rather than file paths automatically across lines, but the same principles apply.