I’m writing a document in Romanian, a language where pretty much all hyphens are non-breaking. In fact, you’re on the safe side to just make them all non-breaking.
I thought it’d be easier to just press the minus key whenever I needed a hyphen and worry about line breaks when I’m done.
However I couldn’t find the option to insert non-breaking hyphens in the Edit -> Insert menu.
Is there another way I can get a non-breaking hyphen?
And while we’re on the subject, is there a way to insert a fixed-width white space, aka “hard space”? (That’s one that doesn’t get elongated because of full text justification when soft spaces would otherwise be added for padding.) The “non-breaking space” which Scrivener has doesn’t seem to be also a hard space.
Open the Find/Replace dialog and type a hyphen in the find field, then click into the Replace field. Open Edit > Special Characters… and search for “non-breaking”, then double-click the hyphen to add it to the Replace field. Make sure your scope is set as you want it and run Replace All.
Thank you, that helps. How about my other problem – the non-breaking aka hard spaces? Your non-breaking spaces are still soft (they do get padded for justification).
If you search for “space” in the Characters dialog, you’ll get a few options of different widths, so you can set the one you need. Combining this with automatic substitutions, you could create unique couple keystrokes that OS X would replace with the chosen space character. You can set up substitutions via the Corrections tab in Scrivener > Preferences. You’ll want to include a space character at the end of the text to replace, because the substitution doesn’t go into effect until typing that, so if it’s not included you’ll end up with both the hard space and a soft space beside it.
I did try the spaces there, but they all get elongated with justified text. I need a space that won’t get elongated.
They are typically used with bulleted lists, right after a bullet. You want a hard space there so text always starts at the same vertical. In Romanian, where dialogue starts with a hyphen followed by a space, it’s pretty much the same issue.