What The Heck is a Non-Joiner Character?
Sam wrote:
I’ve discovered a new character in the context menu under Insert Special Characters > Other menu. It’s called Non Joiner and I can’t find what it does, or when to use it.
We talked about the non-joiner character back in Episode 58 of the InDesignSecrets podcast, but given the number of requests for non-joiner information recently, perhaps it’s worth a review. The non-joiner character (or nonjoiner, which looks like it should be French), is a special zero-width, invisible character (Unicode <200C>) that tells InDesign not to join two characters, such as in a ligature or a script (cursive) typeface.
For example, in the following two words, you can see how adding a non-joiner character between the “Th” and the “fi” disables the ligatures:
nonjoiner
Of course, there are easier ways to turn off ligatures… you could simply disable the ligature feature in the Control panel flyout menu (or the OpenType submenu, in the case of Discretionary Ligatures). Or you could add 1 unit of kerning between the two characters.
Ultimately, the need for the non-joiner character is (or should be) exceedingly rare in our romantic-based languages. But in languages that are based on script faces, such as Arabic or Farsi, the non-joiner is very important.
Given how rare the non-joiner is, it’s quite amazing how much has been written on it (such as the BackChannel and Keith Gilbert’s trick on using the non-joiner in bulletted lists.)
I didn’t know about this little obscurity at all, so thanks for shedding light on it!
But: “our romantic-based languages” — umm, isn’t “roman-based” the mostest rightest word here?
I think the proper term is actually “romance languages,” though “romantic” sounds more pleasureable and is used sometimes.
Watch out applying character styles to non-joiners. I just tried to apply negative tracking to a non-joiner using a nested style applied to one character (I was hoping to find another way to get at Klaus’s Myriad head problem from another topic) and the style was applied not to the non joiner but to the character after it.
Dave
A quick update to that last comment. You can apply a character style directly to a non-joiner. It’s only if you try to do it with a nested style that it fails. Apparently the nested style logic ignores non-joiner characters.