Is it normal to separate hyphenated words on different lines? [duplicate]

I'm typing in Microsoft Word, and it automatically separated the word T-shirt when it ran out of room:

blah blah blah, Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, I have a T-
shirt

leaving just the letter "T" on one line. This doesn't look right to me at all, or for any compound, hyphenated word, yet basically all text boxes will split words at a dash on separate lines if needed. I would prefer:

I have a
T-shirt

I know it would be fine if I were splitting words in a narrow column, like the newspaper, but is there a rule about what you're supposed to do to words like this? Is my way always right, or Word's, or either? (How to get Word to actually stop doing it is a totally different question...)

Solution 1:

In a modern word processor with paragraph justification, there is rarely if ever any reason to split words between lines, unless they are truly giganto-sesquipedalian. A word like 'T-shirt' should never be split. How to get Word to act this way is a topic for another Stack Exchange.

Solution 2:

I don't know whether it's normal, but I'd say it's incorrect, or at least ambiguous. T-shirt is not Tshirt. Splitting the word on the hyphen leads to ambiguity. It should be kept on one line to indicate that the hyphen is indeed part of the word.

Solution 3:

I don't really understand your question - you mean "is it normal to hyphenate a word at a point where the word already has a hyphen?" I would think so, yes.

Solution 4:

When I was first learning to write in school, it was indicated to our class that if you start writing a word that is too long to fit on a line, and find you need to split it, the convention was to hyphenate between syllables, and move the second part of the word to the next line.

Long story short: yes, it is acceptable to do this with already-hyphenated words, or even to split and hyphenate long words to separate lines.

Solution 5:

The way to stop a text editor doing this is to use a special character called a "Non-breaking hyphen". That said, modern versions of MS Office don't seem to break at normal hyphens: Word 2007 keeps both halves of "T-shirt" or "auto-update" on the same line.