Are there non-breaking characters I can use for EN/EM dash? Most of my dashes (i.e. chemical bonds should be non-breaking). I haven't thought about it, but is the + sign non-breaking by nature?

I'm also wondering about non-breaking spaces which seem to register as 'null' when the Table of Contents function displays them.



Thanks for any thoughts!

As far as I know there is no nonbreaking dash, but you can use the minus sign in Unicode, that is, character 2212 which can be inserted as follows: Type in 2212 and then press Alt+X. It requires a font that supports Unicode of course.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Hmmm... that's too bad. Is there a quick list on the internet somewhere of unicode-supported fonts? I know a couple like Palento Linotype, but the ones I know aren't my favourite.

Bryan

Note that it doesn't have to be a "complete" Unicode font. In recent versions of Windows, common fonts such as Times New Roman supports certain Unicode characters, among them the minus sign I mentioned.

Included with Windows (or maybe with Office--I don't remember) are fonts such as Arial Unicode MS which do support a wide range of Unicode characters.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Word supports both em-dash and en-dash. It also has non-breaking and optional hyphens. See: http://makeofficework.com/special_characters.htm

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Correct, but I am looking for a non-breaking-en-dash for example. Not a non-breaking hyphen OR an en dash.

Stephan - I will play with the Arial Unicode font for a bit and see if I can work around the issue through pasting in some of those characters.

Bryan

The minus sign should work as replacement. There may very well be a nonbreaking dash (I don't know), but if it exists, it is probably not available in (all) standard fonts.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

I doubt that non-breaking versions of those characters exist. What you could do, though, is to approximate them by inserting an ordinary non-breaking hyphen and formatting it to 300% width (em-dash) or 200% width (en-dash).

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]