Conditional Slash Similar to Conditional Hyphen?

[Oliver St Quintin]

Is there any way to create a "conditional slash" that operates in a similar
way to a conditional hyphen?

For example, if I were to say: "Check for relevant provisions/requirements",
is there a way to make this wrap conditionally after the slash if the phrase
happens to come at the end of a line?

Thanks

Oliver

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Not as such, but you can insert a No-Width Optional Break after the slash
using Insert | Symbol | Special Characters or 200C, Alt+X.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Oliver-

It appears to me that slashes work that way by default, as long as you do
not preceed/follow them with a space. If using spaces, they would have to be
typed as non-breaking (conditional) in order to preserve the continuity of
the string.

HTH |:>)

 

[Klaus Linke]

Not as such, but you can insert a No-Width Optional Break after the slash
using Insert | Symbol | Special Characters or 200C, Alt+X.

Close: 200B

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

That's interesting. Since I can never remember the right number, I inserted
a No-Width Optional Break using Insert | Symbol | Special Characters and
then used Alt+X to get the number, and it showed 200C, which is labeled ZERO
WIDTH NON-JOINER. Although it displays as a pipe in the Symbol dialog, it is
displayed as the nested rectangle in the document. Moreover, "(normal text)"
(TNR in this instance) doesn't contain the glyph 200B.

Not as such, but you can insert a No-Width Optional Break after the slash
using Insert | Symbol | Special Characters or 200C, Alt+X.

Close: 200B

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Oliver St Quintin]

The "zero width non-joiner" does exactly what I wanted. How could one ever
think to look this up in the help index?

Thanks everyone for your comments and good work.

Oliver

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I have no idea how you'd find it in Help (in fact, I don't think it *is* in
Help. Klaus has an article about it at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/NoWidthSpace.htm, but again I'm not
sure what search terms would turn this up.

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Oliver, Suzanne,

Microsoft really made a mess of this. The characters from "Insert > Symbol > Special characters" are named differently in the different versions, but they never got them right. And in Word2003, they managed to mess up the proper formatting characters in the text, too.

I wouldn't use 200C, because it might stop working in case Microsoft ever fixes this mess.

"Insert > Symbol" doesn't show 200B (and quite a few other non-printing characters) for Times New Roman, but it (they) still work(s).
The dialog does show 200C/200D probably because they are needed in scripts that use ligatures, like Arabic (as far as I understood), to prevent/create ligatures.

Regards,
Klaus