RE: Invisible line break

["Ambos, Paul" PAMBOS@xxxxxxxx]

You are forgetting the object sought: to have a discretionary (not forced
by a soft return) wordbreak after an en-dash or before or after an em-dash.


Wordperfect accomplishes this by a discretionary nonprinting hyphen.
XyWrite theoretically would do this through an entry in the word-separator
part of the Separator Table. The default list on p. 52 of the Xy4
Customization Guide appears to include an em-dash, but also states that you
can put into such tables only "characters from the first 256 characters in
the character set", and the en- and em-dashes are 259 and 260. (Presumably
what is printed in the manual is a #196 "center box bar horizontal".)

One can kludge a solution by surrounding em-dashes or following en-dashes by
a "thin space" character (existing in some fonts) (a regular space is too
large aesthetically, and even if the space after the em-dash doesn't print
then the one before it would), but this would translate inelegantly if at
all into other wordprocessing formats used by Patricia's clients.

No other solution would appear to exist unless the separator-table options
could be expanded.

Regards,

Paul Ambos
pambos@xxxxxxxx



> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Robert Holmgren [SMTP:holmgren@xxxxxxxx]
> Sent:	Monday, March 03, 2003 1:51 AM
> To:	xywrite@xxxxxxxx
> Subject:	Re: Invisible line break
>
> ** Reply to message from "cmadsen"  on Fri, 28
> Feb
> 2003 19:59:08 -0500
>
> Chris:
>
> I'm lost -- please help me out here. No matter what character I assign to
> the
> soft (discretionary) hyphen (VAriable DH), when and if hyphenation
> actually
> occurs, a real hyphen (Ascii 45) is printed to paper. If I correctly
> understand Patricia's goal, she wants to replace the printed hyphen with
> an
> "invisible" character. Off the top of my head, there would be two ways to
> do
> that. You could use *any* character as long as it had width=0. Or, you
> could
> replace the "real hyphen" Ascii-45 with some other character, i.e. a nul
> (Ascii-0) or an Ascii-255 or an Ascii-32 (space)? But both of those
> strategies
> presuppose that there exists a mechanism which can replace the printed
> hyphen
> with some other character -- and AFAIK, there isn't any such mechanism.
> What
> role would the separator table play there? Seems irrelevant to me.
>
> Now, if you're just narrowly trying to get XyWrite to recognize an en or
> em
> dash as a word separator, and hence to perform a natural break at that
> point --
> OK sure: adding em or en to an SE table would enable line wraps, when
> appropriate, after those two characters. But it isn't a systemic solution
> to
> replacing the discretionary hyphen with something invisible. I don't know
> how
> to do that -- I don't believe it is possible.
>
> [P.S. Patricia says she doesn't want to replace the hyphen with a space
> character. I don't understand why not. If hyphenation didn't occur, you
> wouldn't see it. If hyphenation did occur, you also wouldn't see it, at
> least
> not on paper.]
>
> -----------------------------
> Robert Holmgren
> holmgren@xxxxxxxx
> -----------------------------