Preventing line wrap after colons (bug?)

[Aaron]

I'm having trouble with citations such as:

(I:455)

There are no blank spaces at all there, but I'm getting line wraps at the colons, so that they sometimes end up looking like: (I:
455)

This is über-annoying! Any help?

Aaron

[martin]

I'm afraid there's no solution for you currently- this is just the way the system typesetter likes to break the line. We might be able to modify the behavior for a future release, or add a "keep on same line" option.

[rwg]

An alternative would be to introduce a zero-width no-break space, as in Mellel. (Not sure how difficult this would be.)

Rolf

[martin]

An alternative would be to introduce a zero-width no-break space

Thanks for the idea Rolf, and for educating me! We have a solution, as the zero-width non-breaking space is part of Unicode (as U+2060) and Apple's typesetter handles it just fine. Here's what to do:

1. Place the caret after the ":" character.
2. Type the text "U+2060".
3. Select exactly the text "U+2060". Be sure not to include any surrounding characters.
4. Use the menu Edit > Convert > From Unicode Code Points.

You should now have a non-breaking space following the colon. If you use this a lot, it might be a good idea to add it to your QuickFix expansions. You can also use the menu Edit > Special Characters to insert non-breaking spaces, but it can be somewhat involved.

[Aaron]

Thanks! That works. I'm really curious about why apple decided to make line breaks happen at such places. It is also really bad for URLS.