Non-breaking hyphen

The protected hyphen or may not wrap-around dash ( non-breaking hyphen in English ) is used to prevent an automatic line break at a hyphen, such as " i-Punkt " or " joint -s".

For information on using the Web can be found in the article web typography.

Use

The line break is primarily to prevent if the severed part was very short ( as in single letters, abbreviations or numbers): k- factor, X -Ray, Plan Z, ε - ambient or 99 -day Emperor - the last example would be the first hyphen to protect, while the second hyphen one word separation is allowed. Also, in certain formulas such as in chemistry, it is sensible to ensure the connection of components.

Sensibly are protected dashes in connection with protected spaces when automatic line breaks should be prevented. The behavior of a protected hyphen directly before or after a non -breaking spaces ( for example, " font and font size " ) is not unique, then there is a conflict between the separation rules. Internet Explorer, for example, then also protects the space, other Web browsers only the hyphen. The Unicode line breaking algorithm allows in its default behavior to break at this point.

Coding

: At the following location - In the international character encoding system is Unicode, the character " "

• U 2011 "Non -breaking Hyphen " (hyphen, no line breaks).

Production in Text Software

• In OpenOffice and StarOffice with Ctrl Shift - to produce; appear grayed out in the text.
• In Microsoft Word for Windows also with Ctrl Shift -. Alternatively, the Unicode number "2011 " is entered (in Microsoft Word) and converted into characters using the Alt C. This conversion works in both directions and is therefore also suitable for checking whether a character is a normal ( 002D ), soft ( 00AD ) or protected (2011) is a hyphen.
• In LaTeX using the babel package with the language option [ ngerman ] is a protected hyphen with " ~ generated. Example: 99" ~ day emperor. An alternative is \ hbox { -}.
• In HTML it can with the string - (decimal) or - (hexadecimal ) are generated. A named character entity as in the non-breaking spaces ( ) does not exist for the non-breaking hyphen.

In other programs, the input of a protected hyphen is often only indirectly via the clipboard.

Creation in Linux systems

Under most modern Linux systems with UTF- 8 encoding can be the sign "-" means Ctrl Shift U "2011" produce.

Availability

If one uses the sign only internally, this is unproblematic. If one has, however, no influence on what fonts are installed in the reader (such as in the context of HTML documents on Web servers ), so is the use not to be recommended: often the viewer instead of the line sees a surrogate ( as ) because the character is not included in the available fonts. If you create PDF documents with rare characters, the fonts should be included in the file.