A word that crosses a printed line ending can become two fragments when copied from a scan. Searching for the first fragment alone may miss the passage, while retaining a layout hyphen can produce a different search from the continuous word.
The TEI guidance for line beginnings explicitly allows a line boundary to be marked as not breaking a word. It distinguishes the physical arrangement of text from the word sequence a reader reconstructs.
For a practice example, imagine “inter-” at the end of one line and “pretation” at the beginning of the next. Record the visible arrangement if your task is transcription. For a search, you may also need the continuous form “interpretation.” These are related representations with different purposes.
Do not remove every hyphen automatically. Some belong to a compound word rather than the page layout. Check the image, the language and the edition’s conventions before making the change.
If you maintain both a transcription and a searchable reading copy, label them. Otherwise an apparently corrected word may later be mistaken for exactly what the source displayed on one line.
The small distinction matters when checking quotations across editions with different page widths. A failed search may arise from a boundary introduced by printing or extraction, not from the absence of the passage. Rejoining a word should solve that technical problem without silently rewriting the source.
Image: a thematic illustration, not a photograph of this example.