Non-breaking space and similar characters

[gpr]

Hi everyone. Since I didn't receive any answer to my problem about auto-resizing objects (posted July 6), I try with another question. In former versions of Word the key combination CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR inserted a "non-breaking space" (which is seen as a little circle if one presses the "Capital Greek Pi" button to ahow hidden characters). Well, the insertion of nbsp had two effects: first, space size was not affected by justification (i.e., also in case other spaces were enlarged to fit in line width, the nbsp did not enlarge); moreover, nbsp prevents a group of words or a simple formula to divide into two lines. Both of these two features were very useful in case one wrote a simple formula as "m = n" or "y = x^2" without using Equation Editor. Now, I see the using Word 2013 there is something strange in nbsp: this character mantains the indivisibility of a formula, but space are resized by justification, while I expected they remained fixed. Does someone tell me how to lock space size, like in the old versions of Word?



Thank you very much (and excuse me if I used some wrong words...)

Gino (Roma)

[macropod]

Microsoft changed the behaviour of the ASCII 160 character used for the non-breaking space in Word 2013. It now conforms to the CSS space rules, which means it expands/contracts like other spaces when using justification.

If you need a fixed-width non-breaking space, you can use the Narrow No-Break Space (202F, Alt-X). You could create a macro with a keyboard shortcut for this (IIRC, Ctrl-Alt-Space is normally free).

One not-so-obvious difference is that the Narrow No-Break Space appears as a space without the · or º that appears for other spaces when the formatting display is turned on.

[gpr]

Originally Posted by macropod

Microsoft changed the behaviour of the ASCII 160 character used for the non-breaking space in Word 2013. It now conforms to the CSS space rules, which means it expands/contracts like other spaces when using justification.

If you need a fixed-width non-breaking space, you can use the Narrow No-Break Space (202F, Alt-X). You could create a macro with a keyboard shortcut for this (IIRC, Ctrl-Alt-Space is normally free).

One not-so-obvious difference is that the Narrow No-Break Space appears as a space without the · or º that appears for other spaces when the formatting display is turned on.

Thank you very much for your reply. I tried to do so, and now it is working! (I simply assigned the code 202F to the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Alt-Space, since I need not nbsp that is not fixed in width).

Bye

Gino (Roma)