These two characters in my fonts show up with grey backgrounds in a wordprocessor:
This is with Vista and Application Open office Writer 4.0.1
In Word 2007, it’s a bit different with no grey background, but the soft hyphen is not seen at all!
Do I need these characters in my font?
Mike
The grey background in OpenOffice depends on the setting for non-printing characters. If it’s enabled, you will see the grey background.
They are not essential characters. I think you will find that you can still insert those characters in your word-processor if the current font does not included them.
The glyphs are usually identical to space and hyphen apart from their code-points, and I cannot think of any reason to make them different.
Thanks Bhikkhu
I think Word 2007 is treating the soft hyphen correctly: most of the time it should be invisible!
If you want a hyphen to show all the time you should use a normal hyphen.
If you want a long word to break at the right point at the end of a line, that is when you want to insert the soft hyphen.
Honest Bern