An open community 
of Macintosh users,
for Macintosh users.

FineTunedMac Dashboard widget now available! Download Here

Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
How do I do this in Pages?
#40715 05/26/16 05:54 AM
Joined: Jan 2010
OP Offline

Joined: Jan 2010
Despite the fact that I said in another thread that I was going to upgrade to a more powerful word processor, I still haven't done it.

My current problem is with things breaking across lines. I have non-word groups of characters such as "a=b/c" which I want to keep together on one line as if it were a word. But it breaks so that I get "a=b/" at the end of one line, and "c" on the next line which looks terrible. Many if not most word processors have the facility to deal with this. You just select the text and then a menu item that tells it not to break the text. I can't find this in Pages. Is it possible?


Edit:
After much more searching, it appears that there is no function in Pages to keep characters together, and we must depend on the attributes of the various unicode characters. There is no non breaking slash, but there is a unicode code-point called the word joiner, u2060 which is essentially a zero width non breaking space which is supposed to prevent line breaking wherever it occurs. However, I tried it and it doesn't work in Pages.

So, after a bit of messing around, the simplest solution that I found was to use the normal non-breaking space which is easily entered from the keyboard (option-space) and after entering it, select it and change the font size to 1 point. It looks good and keeps everything together.

Last edited by Bob_00001; 05/26/16 06:40 AM.

MacBook Pro 15" (2015)
Sierra 10.12.6
Re: How do I do this in Pages?
Bob_00001 #40717 05/26/16 01:53 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
Offline

Joined: Aug 2009
Good to know. I had no idea it would linebreak at /


I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: How do I do this in Pages?
Bob_00001 #40738 05/30/16 03:48 AM
Joined: Jan 2010
OP Offline

Joined: Jan 2010
Actually there are a number of subtle but significant line breaking characteristics of many of the unicode characters (assuming that the text editing application has been properly implemented).

For example, the hyphen, en-dash, em-dash, and minus sign have different behaviours. For anyone who wonders why you would ever need to have a special minus sign character when you could just use a hyphen or a dash, it all becomes clear when you try to format a negative number at the end of a line.


MacBook Pro 15" (2015)
Sierra 10.12.6

Moderated by  alternaut, dianne, dkmarsh 

Link Copied to Clipboard
Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.4
(Release build 20200307)
Responsive Width:

PHP: 7.4.33 Page Time: 0.015s Queries: 20 (0.010s) Memory: 0.5764 MB (Peak: 0.6329 MB) Data Comp: Zlib Server Time: 2024-03-28 13:26:10 UTC
Valid HTML 5 and Valid CSS