Please add Special Character for “No break” and allow shortcut assignment

[A_B_C]

Hi there,

currently, a couple of special characters, such as space, soft hyphen or various break characters, are displayed when the user selects Text > Show Special Characters. But as far as I can see, there is no indication for whether the No break property is applied to a selection of text or not. However, being able to determine whether this property is applied or not is of vital importance as soon as you try to make manual adjustments to paragraph typesetting. So please add (a) special character(s) of some sort that indicates the presence of No break in a selection of text.

Furthermore, please allow us to assign a keyboard shortcut to this property.

Thank you,

Alex 🙂

[walt.farrell]

As soon as you start talking about more than one word you can't use a single character. You'd need one to mark the start and another to mark the end.

If you're only talking about one word, put a soft hyphen at the beginning of the word.

It has a shortcut, and shows up as a special character.

[loukash]

5 hours ago, A_B_C said:

as far as I can see, there is no indication for whether the No break property is applied to a selection of text or not

Find & Replace panel > Find > cog symbol menu > Format > "Choose Format" dialog opens > Character: Position & Transform > check the "No Break" box
Finds all occurrences of the "No Break" attribute in document.

[sfriedberg]

8 hours ago, A_B_C said:

as far as I can see, there is no indication for whether the No break property is applied to a selection of text or not.

You might add your voice to this thread, where we're asking for a quick way to highlight character overrides, specifically including No Break.

 

[A_B_C]

19 hours ago, A_B_C said:

… (a) special character(s) of some sort …

Walt, that’s why I left it to the developers to find a pleasant solution. “No break” could be indicated by opening and closing brackets of some sort, by underlines, by highlights. There are many options available. And of course, I know that soft-hyphen-trick, but why should I insert a semantically nonsensical character when we have a no-break option? I would love to do away with this unattractive workaround.

Lukáš, I know that you can search for virtually all character attributes, but that doesn’t help in practice. When you manually correct long paragraphs of flush-left, ragged-right typesetting (you know, we are talking about the difference between “Rauhsatz” and true “Flattersatz” here), it doesn’t help that you can search for no-break characters, for you will have to see all the substrings of your text where “No break” is applied, at once. Otherwise, it is impossible to properly balance the line lenghts for the entire paragraph and find the best compromise. I can only speak from practical experience.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, A_B_C said:

that doesn’t help in practice

Frankly, in practice, I wouldn't use No Break here in the first place.
In the past two decades, I've been using No Break only for e-mail  and web addresses as part of the corresponding character styles. (Usually using regex search and batch applying a character style.)
To adjust flushed text, I'm using other means, hyphenation parameters, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, you name it.

Only recently while transitioning from InDesign to Publisher, I was experimenting with workarounds for the lack span columns by using No Break on whole title paragraphs:

 

[loukash]

Back on actual topic:

21 hours ago, A_B_C said:

Please add Special Character for “No break”

"No Break" cannot be a special character because there is no such character that can define how many of the following characters should be affected.
In Affinity, when applied, the No Break attribute will affect all selected characters except when a special character is being used that can override it at a given point. That can be a soft hyphen, line break, paragraph break etc.

So the only applicable option I see here is the aforementioned highlight request.
But then again, any style override should be optionally highlighted, not just "no break".

Workaround:

Since I'd personally use No Break only as part of a character style – for the obvious benefits of using styles in the first place as opposed to ad hoc overrides that are generally hard to keep track of – I'd simply add a temporary highlight to my respective "No Break" character style:

[loukash]

^ That all said…

21 hours ago, A_B_C said:

allow shortcut assignment

That's definitely a reasonable feature request.
Comparably, InDesign has this attribute as a Character panel menu item, and those have assignable keyboard shortcuts.

[sfriedberg]

When I am working on math stuff, which involves multiple character styles typically changing every one to three characters, I use No Break a lot to ensure that each coherent math "word" stays together.  I generally have the Character panel open, and my mini-workflow is to select a span of characters, mouse over to the Character panel and turn the No Break checkbox on.  If I've been working on cut-paste stuff, I will frequently turn No Break off for the entire span, then turn it on.  I'm not sure the "force it off then turn it on" is necessary, but it gives me confidence that the attribute has been set consistently on the entire span.

[A_B_C]

Nice workaround, Lukáš. Thank you. And of course, I agree with your objection against the title of my initial post. 😀

 

[MikeTO]

I also use no break a lot and it's an excellent suggestion to use it only as part of a character style. I just went through my document and replaced the direct character attribute with a character style.