Comments on: Discretionary Line Breaks

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:09:49 +0000

Yes, we sort of discussed this (the 200B character) a long time ago… or perhaps it was FEFF. Check out the script and info in the comments on this page.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 13:54:49 +0000

Thank you Marc! It looks like your web site has some great information but I don’t speak French. So I used my handy-dandy translation trick* to get this English translation of your web page (the second link): June 2007. (Scroll down to “InDesign CS3 and the Crazy History of Space.”)

It’s a far from perfect translation (and it can’t do images, which captions in your illustrations appear to be), but it helps to make some sense of the other text.

*The trick: Copy the URL of the web page you want to translate and paste it into Google’s search field and search for it. Only one “hit” will result — the same page — but you’ll see a “Translate this page” text link next to the name of the hit. Use that Translate link to view the page.

By: Marc Autret

Marc Autret — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 09:49:33 +0000

The secret is that the discretionary line break is emulated by InDesign with Unicode zero width space char (U+200B) and that *IT WORKS* too in ID CS and CS2!! You just have to insert a U+200B character. How? Using the InDiCode script:

http://marcautret.free.fr/geek/indd/unicode/part3.php

So it’s not necessary to buy CS3 to have this feature.

More secrets about ID spaces:
http://marcautret.free.fr/news/nw0706.php#S4

By: Eugene

Eugene — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 17:37:45 +0000

Great post and great tip, we all have our own way of working and this is how I do it.

I have a “No Break” character style for stuff like this, I GREP search things like website addresses and emails and apply a character style that has nothing else but the no break feature in it.

But again, this is where I want that “keep (x amount of ) words together” feature, like for when you have one word at the end a paragraph I would love to keep them together, also this could work with keeping email addresses, web addresses and other things together that could be automated without having to put in hidden characters or specific styles. What’s needed is intelligent typesetting features.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 12:57:25 +0000

In my experience setting type full of URLs, it’s fairly rare for InDesign to hyphenate words they contain. 90% of the time it breaks them after periods or slashes. (Try setting the same type in QXP to see what we *used* to have to deal with.)

When it does hyphenate a word, inserting a DLB before it doesn’t guarantee the line will break there, as shown below. It depends on your other H&J settings.

Inserting a discretionary hyphen before the word *does* guarantee the line will break there because you’re disabling hyphenation for the word; so ID has no choice other than forcing it to the next line.

But if you export it to PDF, Reader/Acro’s automatic “sensing” of linked URLs sees that disc hyphen and includes it in the URL; resulting in 404 Not Found pages in a web browser. (It sees auto-hyphens too, which also break URLs.)

For all the above reasons I use the No Break style for the word that’s hyphenating. That does the trick for the line break and Acro/Reader still understands the entire URL correctly.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 12:09:31 +0000

Dan, that’s an interesting solution. So in the example above, you’d put the discretionary hyphen (command/ctrl-shift-hyphen) before the word “indesignsecrets”. That forces that one word to stick together. You could also select that word and use the No Break command (which I like more than the discretionary hyphen for things like this).

However, the discretionary line break is more elegant in many cases because you can place the break exactly where you want it. In some very long URLs (or other very long words), you want/need more control over the position of the break.

By: Daniel Rodney

Daniel Rodney — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 03:06:41 +0000

While the DLB is great, this example is better done (in any version of InDesign) using a discretionary hyphen in place of the DLB. I like to use discretionary hyphens when trying to avoid hyphenation. Putting them at the beginning of a word prevents hyphenation. No doubt DLB are cool, but it actually doesn’t always work to prevent a hyphenation in cases like this. Only if it’s close enough to the edge of the frame will the DLB work. A discretionary hyphen would work every time, regardless of proximity (of course it just prevents the hyphenation, it doesn’t force the line to break). DLB are great, but I don’t think this example isn’t the best use of them.

By: Alexandre Giesbrecht

Alexandre Giesbrecht — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:27:34 +0000

Augh! More and more reasons to upgrade. But the answer from the boss is always “Not on budget yet”. Maybe next year. Maybe for CS4?

By: Ben Leivian

Ben Leivian — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:14:40 +0000

Very nice, thanks for explaining this new feature.