What is this character

[MickRose]

Sometimes when I import PDFs I get this special character as a space character. Does it have a name and is there a way to change these characters to normal spaces?

[MikeTO]

It's a non-breaking space which is the same width as a regular space but Publisher won't break a line at this space. You can see the full list of special characters in the table below. You can search for this character by copying it to the clipboard and pasting it into Find & Replacing, replacing it with a regular space if you choose.

Cheers

 

[thomaso]

Weird, the Help is still lacking their visuals.
https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Text/specialCharacters.html?title=Special characters and glyphs

[v_kyr]

9 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Weird, the Help is still lacking their visuals.

Well there's still plenty of room for improvements, also in terms for the overall help contents!

[MickRose]

Thanks @MikeTO. Thanks - that works. I noticed that the non-breaking space can be accessed in the drop down menu in the find/replace menu.

[MickRose]

On a similar theme, is it possible to use find & replace on just one frame or will it always use the whole document?

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, MickRose said:

On a similar theme, is it possible to use find & replace on just one frame or will it always use the whole document?

It will search the complete document.

If you insert appropriate "context" markers into a text frame, you can restrict the operation, but it's a bit tricky. For example, you could insert something at the beginning and end of the frame that doesn't occur anywhere else in the document. Perhaps something like _%_ and then you cold search for _%_.*?your-search-string.*?_%_ which would restrict the search to that specific text frame. Then at the end you would remove both of the _%_ from the frame.

[thomaso]

10 minutes ago, MickRose said:

find & replace

Add your vote! … or create a feature request for V2.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, thomaso said:

Weird, the Help is still lacking their visuals.

FWIW, from that help topic: 

Quote

To identify an individual character by its Unicode value, place the insertion point immediately after the character and select Text>Toggle Unicode.

So it would be possible if tedious to use that to get the Unicode value & use that to identify what the character is.

BTW, it also works if the insertion point is immediately before the character (which is useful because it does not work for the pilcrow because you can't set the insertion point after it).

[MikeTO]

5 hours ago, thomaso said:

Weird, the Help is still lacking their visuals.
https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Text/specialCharacters.html?title=Special characters and glyphs

That's why I created the table, well that and the fact that Help doesn't list all the special characters.