FR: non-breaking spaces effective in Project Info fields

Dorico
,
1

I wish I could put a non-breaking space between the copyright symbol and the first word following it so that the copyright symbol is not the last glyph on a line.

I prepare the copyright data in another (word processing) program and then copy-paste it into Dorico’s Project Info (Command-I) “Copyright” field. But the non-breaking space does not “stick.”

Does anyone else think it seems typographically inelegant to have a © “hanging” out at the end of a line?

Would this be a good enhancement?

Thanks,
Eric

2

In the Copyright field of Project Info, Dorico treats the Unicode no-break space (U+00A0) the same as a normal space. However, it treats the Unicode narrow no-break space (U+202F) as a non-breaking space. Use the narrow no-break space after the copyright symbol.

3

Thank you, @johnkprice. I’ll try that – probably tomorrow – and report back.
Eric

4

Thanks John, that’s something I had never noticed before… One or two U+202f short unbreakable spaces do the trick, but I’m really wondering why a “normal” unbreakable space does not work in that field. Is this something that has had to be programmed in, for some arcane reason? (That question would be for @dspreadbury, obviously)

5

I’ll report on my findings. (I wasted time by not trying to use U+202F directly in Dorico before I tried doing it in a word processor. My workflow has been to prepare the author/copyright data in another app and then paste it into Dorico.) Conclusion: U+202F works great to do what I want in Dorico’s Project Info Copyright field.

My odyssey:
I was struggling to use the character @johnkprice said would work. I wanted there to be some visible space between the © symbol and the word or date (series of digits) that follow it.

No matter what I tried, it seemed that the Unicode U+202F Narrow Non-Breaking Space character was so extremely narrow that even if you insert several of them you won’t see any space.

I was attempting to do it in the word processor Nisus Writer Pro. I used the Mac “Unicode Hex Input” method and it seemed as if the character was placed in the text based on how the cursor behaved. But I could not see anything that was inserted (I saw no distance whatsoever between the © and the following text). Then I tried inputting it several times, and I never saw anything. I have Show Invisibles turned on in Nisus Writer Pro, and the regular spaces have a little dot to show where they are, but I saw nothing for the U+202F space.

Next I tried to use Keyboard Maestro (still in Nisus Writer Pro). Here is the macro I created:
screenshot_2024-04-10_at_07.55.53_w500
It seemed like it did its thing: the string trigger was deleted; but I could not tell if anything was inserted.

Next I tried using the Keyboard Maestro method within Dorico 5. It worked brilliantly! (I’ll shorten the trigger string now that I know it works!)

Lesson learned: some word processors may not display the U+202F character visibly.

6

And actually some fonts do not have this character at all — which is a problem when you want to write French correctly as those short spaces are needed…

7

Confirmed: Academico does not have U+202F. And the text engine Qt uses doesn’t provide for fallback fonts.

Back to the original problem, Daniel @dspreadbury, is this a Qt issue that the non-breaking space does not work?

8

So… your copyright text is long enough that it breaks onto a new line after the © symbol?
Couldn’t you just add a Return before the © symbol…?

Or am I missing something?

9

Yes, @benwiggy, there is some complexity in this project regarding the text with the © symbol. The author / copyright information is usually a long paragraph (written in prose) with data about the original work (date[s], author[s], composer[s], copyright[s]), and also the same information for the translation.

More than once I’ve seen the © symbol end up at the end of a line, but until I learned about U+202F, I had been unable to fix it.

10

Lazily, I have always pinched a non-breaking space from elsewhere in the project info and pasted it in after the copyright sign. Not too arduous.

11

Hello colleagues,

We have been successfully applying the solution with the U+202F, on Windows workstations. (Many thanks to @johnkprice !)

However, we discover now that on Mac workstations (with the same fonts installed as under Windows), the solution does not work: thenon-breaking spaces we added between words are disappearing, with the words seemingly be glued to each otjher.

Is there a solution with a character that works in both Windows and MacOS platforms?

12

The U+202F glyph isn’t in the Adobe “Std” character set. Nonbreaking space is 00A0.

Dorico respects non-breaking spaces if you turn off the Markdown syntax.

Screenshot
Screenshot618×244 14.8 KB

But, obviously, if the line is too long for the text frame, it will split the line at a NBSP.

13

Hello Ben,

Thank you for looking at our question!

We’ll try with the 00A0 character. Turning off Markdown formatting is not really an option for us… We’ll let you know how it works out.

14

Can you not explicitly define the frame size and text to be exactly as you want it?

At the very least, you can paste text on more than one line into any of the fields that only show one line.

15

The reason is that we develop responsive layouts. If the display is 20 cm wide (on a tablet or larger) a nice title will fit without line breaks:

image

But on a narrow display like a phone you may need to split it, like this:

image

The non-breaking spaces make sure that for example “for Violin and Orchestra”, “in E Minor” and “Op. 64” stay together on the same line (you cannot get a line break between “E” and “Minor”).

Thanks for the question :slight_smile: .

16

A peculiar side-effect of using the narrow non-breaking space U+202F in the Other Info field with multiple lines - it increases the line spacing of the paragraph that contains the nbsp.

17

I wonder if it does that only with certain fonts.

18

I agree with @EricC that this might depend on what font you are using. I do not observe any significant change in line spacing when I use Academico as the font.

19

The fact that U+202F in Academico is a “normal” length unbreakable space has been a concern of mine for years… I remember having written to Daniel about it, and I ended up modifying Academico with a Font tool to make it narrower. So I’d say it’s definitely a fonts problem.

20

Although it is possible that Academico has changed at some point, I find that the narrow no-break space in Academico is currently narrower than the normal space:
image