Conditional line break without hyphen

[Ferdinand Fichtner]

Crosspost from m.p.w.docmanagement
Sorry, no helpful answer there...



Hi,

I have a couple of URLs in my document which I want to be line-broken
(hmm?) if necessary.

In order to tell Word where to break the URL I need something like the
conditional hyphen, but without the hyphen, of course. I can't use a
simple space, as it would of course appear in the URL.

In the special characters, I find a thing which is called (in my
German Word 2000) something like "conditional zero-width break". It
sounds as if it could do the job, but it doesn't do anything. It
inserts a quadratic box if formatting marks are turned on, though. No
other effect. I couldn't find any information about this "character"
(probably due to the fact that I don't know how it's called in English
versions of Word) on the web.

So, that's essentially what I'm looking for: a conditional hyphen
without a hyphen. Or any other way to put line breaks into my URLs.

If someone has an English version of Word and could help me out with
the name of the special character described above (it's the last but
one entry in the list of Symbols\Special Characters\) might be a good
start.

Thanks for your help,

Ferdinand

 

[Peter Hewett]

Hi Ferdinand

You should be able to add any character(s) to the displayed URL. When you
insert or edit a hyperlink you'll see "Text to display" and a "File or
hyperlink name" input fields. Word actually stores the displayed and used
hyperlink parts separately. As an example I created the following
hyperlink, here's what it looks like in Word:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/XXX/
Userforms/index.htm

(and the linebreak is part of the displayed text) and here's the actual
hyperlink address Word uses when you click on it:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Userforms/index.htm

To try this insert the hyperlink using Insert Hyperlink (Ctrl+K) and set
both "Text to display" and a "File or hyperlink name" to the same URL and
click OK. Do NOT click on the Hyperlink field you've just added. Position
the cursor either at the begining or end of the hyperlink and then use the
left/right arrow keys to move the cursor to where you want the line break.
Now press Shift+Enter for a new line. Now move the cursor back to the
begining of the hyperlink field and use Ctrl+SHift to select the entire
Hyperlink field. Now press Ctrl+F11 to lock the field!

The reason you don't click on the Hyperlink is that Word will try to update
the link to that of the displayed text until you lock the field.

It's a bit tricky but once you've done it once or twice you'll get the
idea.

Doing it with a macro is pretty easy as well!

HTH + Cheers - Peter

 

[Ferdinand Fichtner]

Hi Peter

You should be able to add any character(s) to the displayed URL. When you
insert or edit a hyperlink you'll see "Text to display" and a "File or
hyperlink name" input fields.

You are absolutely right. And I even don't care if these links are
broken (they don't have to be clickable).

But I need conditional breaks, as the document is likely to change a
lot in the next revisions. Therefore, I don't want to use the
inflexible solution by inserting manual linebreaks (Shift+Enter). I
wan't to tell Word where it's allowed to break a word (URL) in two
lines. But there, the word (URL) is just to be broken if it makes
sense - but without inserting a hyphen.

Thanks for your suggestion.

Greetings, Ferdinand

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See "How to make URLs (and delimiters such as \, /, : and @) wordwrap in
Word"
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/NoWidthSpace.htm