Non-breaking hyphen bug or feature?

[Charles]

With Word 12.2.4, I notice that when text with non-breaking hyphens is
copied into a plain-text editor, the hyphens are left out. This is a
problem when a news release is submitted to a Web site, for example, and
the release is displayed without the hyphens.

I guess there is no way around this except not to use non-breaking
hyphens?

Thank you,

Charles

 

[CyberTaz]

What 'text editor' are you using? Some text editors do not support
non-breaking hyphens and even with those which do it may vary depending on
the font being used ‹ not all fonts include the non-breaking hyphen among
their glyphs. I just did a brief test here using both Arno Pro & Times New
Roman, pasted into Apple's TextEdit & the hyphen definitely is included.

Note, however, that if I copy that same content in TextEdit & paste back
into Word the hyphen is maintained as a regular hyphen without the
non-breaking attribute.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[John McGhie]

Make sure your plain-text text editor is running in Unicode. If it isn't,
missing hyphens will be the least of your worries

The old ASCII/ANSI character set does not contain enough characters to
describe the content of a Word document these days.

If you use Word to Save As and specify .txt as the format, Word will convert
the soft hyphens for you. But then, the document is stored in the old Mac
International character set, which will give you wrong character problems on
the web.

Cheers

With Word 12.2.4, I notice that when text with non-breaking hyphens is
copied into a plain-text editor, the hyphens are left out. This is a
problem when a news release is submitted to a Web site, for example, and
the release is displayed without the hyphens.

I guess there is no way around this except not to use non-breaking
hyphens?

Thank you,

Charles

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

 

[Charles]

What 'text editor' are you using? Some text editors do not support
non-breaking hyphens and even with those which do it may vary depending on
the font being used ‹ not all fonts include the non-breaking hyphen among
their glyphs. I just did a brief test here using both Arno Pro & Times New
Roman, pasted into Apple's TextEdit & the hyphen definitely is included.

Note, however, that if I copy that same content in TextEdit & paste back
into Word the hyphen is maintained as a regular hyphen without the
non-breaking attribute.

I am using TextWrangler, but only to check this behavior.

The problem happens if I copy the Word doc text and paste it into the
posting mechanism offered by the Web site, or if I send the Word doc
itself to a site, which then does whatever they do to get the text to
display. In both cases, the non-breaking hyphens are lost.

I do see that TextEdit preserves the hyphens, but whatever the Web sites
are using, which is beyond my control, doesn't.

Charles

 

[Charles]

Make sure your plain-text text editor is running in Unicode. If it isn't,
missing hyphens will be the least of your worries

The old ASCII/ANSI character set does not contain enough characters to
describe the content of a Word document these days.

If you use Word to Save As and specify .txt as the format, Word will convert
the soft hyphens for you. But then, the document is stored in the old Mac
International character set, which will give you wrong character problems on
the web.

I am using TextWrangler 3.1. In TextWrangler Preferences > Text
Encodings, the Default text encoding for new documents is Unicode
(UTF-8, no BOM).

Charles

 

[John McGhie]

Yeah, but your problem is the character set being employed by websites you
are posting to. This has nothing to do with Word.

If you can't control the character set, you can't control the problem.
Don't use hyphenation on the web, because it's not supported in the
old-fashioned character set many websites use.

Websites should be using UTF-8 (which describes every character there is)
but many are stuck back in the days of ISO-8859 (or worse, Windows 1252)
character sets that simply don't have optional hyphen characters.

Cheers

I am using TextWrangler 3.1. In TextWrangler Preferences > Text
Encodings, the Default text encoding for new documents is Unicode
(UTF-8, no BOM).

Charles

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

 

[Charles]

Yeah, but your problem is the character set being employed by websites you
are posting to. This has nothing to do with Word.

If you can't control the character set, you can't control the problem.
Don't use hyphenation on the web, because it's not supported in the
old-fashioned character set many websites use.

Websites should be using UTF-8 (which describes every character there is)
but many are stuck back in the days of ISO-8859 (or worse, Windows 1252)
character sets that simply don't have optional hyphen characters.

The problem is not all hyphens, only non-breaking ones. And it doesn't
happen only with Web sites, but when I copy and paste the text into
TextWrangler.

Charles