Sorry for the crappy title, I couldn’t think of a better one!
Let’s say in a Word 2010 document there’s a line of text that ends in an em-dash and an closing quotation mark. For example:
Now, in this document, the name “Sue” is actually a merge field, so the length of this text will vary depending on whatever name is pulled from the database.
My problem is that in certain cases, this ends up with the line breaking thusly:
As you can see, the quotation mark is treated as a separate entity from the em-dash and is pushed onto the next line.
Is there any way to force quotation marks to “stick” with the preceding character/text? Sort of similar to the way HTML has a nonbreaking space character?
Ideally I’d just rewrite the sentence but it’s not always possible. Any suggestions?
The only thing I can think of is to do some post-processing.
Let Word format the document, and then save it such that the line breaks are preserved.
Then, search-and-replace —^p" with —"^p and hope that that all the lines fit.
Ugly solution: put the --" characters in a text box, inlined with the text and with zero margins. You may have to adjust the size and alignment of the text box to make the text-box characters line up properly with the other characters.
Word has a “no-width non-break” character that seems like it ought to do this, but it doesn’t appear to work.
Thanks, guys! Your comments about nonbreaking spaces gave me some helpful keywords for a search, and I think I’ve found the answer in this tutorial at word.tips.net here.
Find an em-dash; select it.
On the “Insert” ribbon, choose “Symbol”
Click the “more symbols” link
Under the “font” dropdown box, choose “(normal text)” and under "Subset choose “General Punctuation.” These may be defaults already but just make sure they’re right.
You’ll probably find the symbol for “em-dash” is already marked. Choose the symbol to the right – also looks like an “em-cash” – and click “insert.”
Voila! Now this symbol will “stick” to the words and punctuation on either side of it. (I’ve tried this by inserting a bunch of spaces and once the word and this symbol & quotation mark reach the end of the line, the whole group drops down rather than just the em-dash or the quotation mark.
To do this for your whole document:
Select the symbol you’ve just added and copy it to your clipboard.
Open up the Find/Replace dialogue box.
For “Find” choose the “Special” category and select “em-dash”
For “Replace” choose the “Special” category again and select “Clipboard Contents”
Choose “Replace All” and hit “OK.”
Whew! I’m psyched to have found this option. Thanks for all your help, everyone. Your responses helped give me the proper terminology to find the info I was looking for.
I think you might want to look into autocorrect and see if you can replace --" automatically with your new found character. That would be better than replacing all em dashes, as you don’t want something like “indubidibly—surprisingly” to always be stuck together.
I sorta think you can type the non-breaking hyphens by using control-shift just like with the spaces, although it’s been yeas since I was doing that regularly. I don’t recall the keystroke for dashes, so I don’t know if it’s feasible with them.
I ran into the same problem with en-dashes a while back. When I scoured the internet the consensus seemed to be that there was no non-breaking en-dash, but a minus sign looks almost the same and does the trick. Glad to see that there is a non-breaking em-dash. If you have Word open now, could you tell us the character code?
This got me to wondering: Is an en-dash very different than a hyphen (in most fonts)? Let’s see…
Here is an N
and here’s a - (hyphen)
NNNNNNNN (8 N’s)
-------- (8 hyphens)
Hmm… the hyphen/minus sign isn’t nearly as wide as then N. And the em-dash isn’t as wide as an ‘M’ either.
————————
MMMMMMMM
I worked in a print shop long ago. We used offset printing presses as well as a few movable type/linotype presses. I was always taught that an em-dash is the width of a capital M, and an en-dash is the width of a capital N. Wikipedia* says, however, that with some newer fonts the dash length is based on lower-case m’s and n’s. So… lets look at that:
mmmmmmmm
————————
nnnnnnnn
––––––––
The en-dashes look like they are equal to lower-case n’s, but the em-dashes don’t quite make it. Hmmmmmm… Oh well, sorry… I hope my “scribblings” and musings weren’t too annoying!
on edit: That’s weird! When I composed my post, the en-dashes were equal to the ‘n’. But when it posted, they were different!
*Wikipedia also says that an em-dash is also called a “mutton”. I’d never heard that. The master printer where I worked always called it a “molly” (with the en-dash being a “nut”).
This is actually the same sort of thing: the real character is a horizontal line rather than an em dash.
I personally would do it with two hyphens and a straight quote ("), so I could continue typing normally, rather than having to intentionally type an em-dash and a right quote.
That said, I tried this on my copy of Word 2003, and while it will apparently work if I use it right after setting the autocorrect, once I type anything else, it fails. Word will use a straight quote for some reason (although it does replace the em dash with a horizontal line as it should).
