This is a very straightforward bug, and it’s probably not so much a bug in Scrivener as it is with the Cocoa text editor tools.
As a lawyer, I tend to quote things all the time, but I often need to make alterations to the quotations (say, to change the tense). The standard way to show that a quote has been altered is to use brackets, and these often show up within (or usually at the end of) a single word. Unfortunately, when Scrivener wraps the text it will break up those words at the alteration points. So the sentence “I alter[ed] this quote,” might be laid out as:
“I alter
[ed] this quote.”
This is a pretty big problem for me… Microsoft Word correctly handles the altered words, so I can just compile to a Word file and print from there, but it’s a bit annoying.
It’s the Apple text engine, so there’s really not a lot that can be done with it. You can however use Edit>Insert>Word Joiner before your opening bracket to keep it connected with the rest of the word–it’s like a non-breaking space, but with 0 width. (To make this faster, if you’re doing it a lot, you can assign a keyboard shortcut via System Preferences.)
One thing to try to automate that process further would be to set up a replacement in the “Replacements” pane of the Compile sheet, and have all instances of “[” replaced with word-joiner-character+[ (to insert a word joiner in one of the replacement fields you will need to use the Special Characters palette).
All the best,
Keith
Wow, thanks! That works great.
The fully automated replacement solution won’t work for me, since the text editor seems to treat as simply . So if I have a quotation like “We [ate] together,” automatically adding word joiners will treat the entire three-word phrase as as single unit, which isn’t what I want. But I’ll just make a keyboard shortcut and use them as needed (i.e., when the alterations are mid-word).
Thanks again!