🚀 go-pugleaf

Isn't that an application issue rather than a font issue?

Neil

I think you're right. As far as I can see, Unicode/opentype apps just use the unicode values of the character to decide whether they can break the line or not, but I was just hoping opentype might offer a way to change the default behaviour.

This is an app issue rather than an OpenType issue, but InDesign does have a way of doing this. Apply "no break" character formatting.

Cheers,

T

Unicode specifies values for at least two no-break spaces - the standard no-break space (U+00A0) and the zero-width no-break space (U+FEFF). Then there are all the fixed width spaces (em, en, 3-to-em, 6-to-em, etc) that are usually treated as no-breaking spaces by apps.

Right, but the non-breaking spaces don't help if what you want is for a word not to get hyphenated....

T

True, and in some apps (like ID) a discretionary hyphen before a word will do the same as the no-break attribute, but the way I read Matthew's post, he was asking after a no-break space rather than a way to suppress hyphenation.

Thanks for the replies. I was talking about backslashes actually, which Indesign breaks lines after. I know you can apply no-break, or type a discretionary hyphen, but I was hoping opentype might offer a way to avoid manual intervention.

Matthew,

Do you mean backslashes (\) or slashes (/) ?

Neil

Can't remember which was the problem now - I think it was backslashes. But Indesign breaks lines after both of them regardless of the hyphenation setting, and as far as I can see there is no preemptive way to control this.

The only reason why I even ask is that the backslash (\) character is so rarely used. Going off-topic for a moment, I cringe every time I hear a commercial or promo that gives a Web address with backslashes.

Neil

> But Indesign breaks lines after both of them regardless of the hyphenation setting

I don't think it does, unless IDCS3 has changed this. I may be wrong, and I do recall some discussion about how different versions of ID handled URLs when it came to breaking them, but my quick trial shows that IDCS2 doesn't break after the forward or back slash. It will, of course, break if you're putting spaces around them, but then you can use U+00A0. Note, however, that these NB spaces will not flex with justification, so the best approach is to use a normal space with a no-break attribute. Because you don't want manual intervention, I assume you're importing from a database or from some source and you want it all precoded. Can you code to include a no-break character style around the spaces?

The problem is actually arising when working in Indian languages and having to use non-unicode roman-encoded fonts which contain glyphs for the Indian script in all the font's available slots (you have to use a separate font for roman text). So Indesign is breaking Indian words at what it thinks are backslashes or slashes. I've checked it again and it's definitely doing it (Quark doesn't do it incidentally). If it's not doing it with you Dominic there must be some difference in our setup and I'd like to know what that is.

I just did some experimentation with a few of my (obsolete, yet still useful every day) proprietary-encoding Indic fonts. In each case, I found that all I had to do was turn off hyphenation, and apply No Break to the glyph that was encoded as a slash. Once I'd done that, ID respected the No Break attribute, and no longer tried to break the text on glyphs that occupied codepoints on which ID would usually be permitted to break.

What font are you using?

Are you saying that if you apply no break to a glyph once, ID will not break on that glyph anywhere else in the document? As far as I can see, no break applies only to the text selected.
The fonts that were causing a problem were the Shree-Lipi ones. Unfortunately they seem to have put commonly-used glyphs on the slash codepoints, whereas the other fonts we often use put rarely used glyphs there.

No-break applies only to the text its applied to. But you can easily do a search and replace to apply no break to all slashes.

Today ID is breaking after slashes. It wasn't the other day, but I don't know what the difference between the files is.

      Are you saying that if you apply no break to a glyph once, ID will not
      break on that glyph anywhere else in the document? As far as I can see,
      no break applies only to the text selected.




Whoops! No, I wasn't trying to say that at all. Of course, you'd need to either do a find/replace, or perhaps automate the process with a script. Most of the fonts for the languages I handle (notably Khmer, Lao, and Burmese) have odd proprietary encodings, much like your Shree-Lipi. Because each font family has its own quirks and hassles, I've actually written my own rudimentary text-cleanup scripts to automate the process of applying No Break to particular glyphs, replace spaces, fix problems with discretionary hyphens, and so on. I've gone so far as to include my translator's favorite typos in these scripts.

If you spend a lot of time processing Hindi text, you may want to investigate scripting ID to take the text-prep busywork off your shoulders.

Good thought, thanks