Insert an "mspace", "nspace" or "non breaking space"?

''John Dreystadt (PTC) has one answer. Suzanne Napoleon an even better.'' Last Updated: 2006-09-23

=John Dreystadt=

I am assuming you are on Windows, the Unix version of this is different in some of the details.

In the help look up Insert Symbols dialog box. If you have entity declarations for some individual characters, these will appear in the Character Entities tab and also on the tool bar (the button looks like the Greek omega).

Our default AXDocBook example document has entities for several characters including non-breaking space. The Symbol tab on the same dialog will get you access to pretty much all of the Unicode characters such as en space and em space. If your authors are using the same set quite a bit, they will discover that we are caching recently used characters on the Symbol tab. If your users are using a certain set heavily, add entity declaractions for the appropriate set of characters.

=Suzanne Napoleon=

Keymappings can be used to make these spaces faster/easier to author. Enter show fullkeymapping at the command line to see current keymappings. The default mapping for Control+Shift+Space inserts a non-breaking space, and Shift+Space is mapped to insert a spacebar space. You can remap keys to insert the spaces you want.

(Editor's comment by Karl Johan Kleist: Below is shown the default keymapping for inserting a non-breaking space / a spacebar space.)

Control+Shift+Space InsertNbsp alias InsertNbsp { if (entity_exists("nbsp")) { insert_entity nbsp } else { insert_string " " } } Shift+Space InsertSpace alias InsertSpace insert_string ' '