nisus.com

Hi,

I write in french and I am looking for a way to introduce narrow non-breaking spaces before some characters as ; ? and !

As Wikipedia says, in French spacing, for example, a non-breaking space is inserted between words and their enclosing quotation marks and between the last word of a sentence and a question mark.

But in Belgium and Switzerland, for instance, those spaces must be half spaces. So are the rules.

So how can I get them in NWP ? ... with a swiss-french keyboard ?

Gieff

Narrow no-break space (U+202F) is not assigned to any key (or key combination) in any Roman keyboard layout because it is not a MacRoman character. You could create a custom Cocoa keybinding, a custom keyboard layout or a NW Pro macro (Type Text "\x{202F}") which enables you to insert the character but fonts having it are very rare. So, most likely U+202F thus inserted will be represented by Lucida Grande, which would not be desirable in most cases.

A practical solution would be to apply an attribute on no-break spaces (U+00A0) inserted automatically (by Nisus Writer Pro: "Use smart punctuation..." in Preference - QuickFix) or manually (option-space) so that they look shorter. A while ago, I wrote a macro for that purpose and posted it at
http://www.nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14341#p14341
which applies Subscript style on no-break spaces before ; ! ?.

A macro which changes the font size of those no-break spaces would not be practical. It is OK if you run such a macro on a document just once and nevermore. But if you run it repeatedly... You can remove Subscript style very easily but you cannot know the original font size without inspecting the fontsize of adjacent characters. That is tedious and not always reliable.