Forward slash and hyphenation

General comments and questions. Technical support.
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patr
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri May 06, 2016 8:05 pm

Forward slash and hyphenation

Post by patr »

Hi everyone,

I have this huge document I'm editing. It's a translation from Bengali and the translators chose to use forward slashes to give multiple translations for a certain word. For example:

buddhi: intelligence/intellect

I don't want to change the usage of the forward slashes, but the problem I'm running into is that some words are rather long and mess up the spacing of the lines. Forward slashes don't act like hyphens at the end of lines, so instead it sees the entire "intelligence-intellect" as one long word and so when using justified align it really throws off the spacing.

Then again, I know it's not good form to end a line with a forward slash; but they are too prevalent in this particular document and I don't want to substantially change it. What I thought of doing was to add spaces before and after the forward slash _/_ and selecting the spaces and instead of leaving it as 12pt font, change these two spaces to 4pt font so that the forward slash doesn't really look like it has spaces and effectively acts like a hyphen at the end of lines (to continue the example: it then breaks up intelligence / intellect up into two parts and "intellgence" rolls over into the new line).

I know it's a shoddy solution but I was thinking perhaps someone has a better solution?

Any thoughts are appreciated!
Alan
Posts: 247
Joined: Wed Jul 24, 2002 11:57 am
Location: TN USA

Post by Alan »

I don't have a better way to do this but a minor improvement. If this is to act like a hyphen the forward slash needs to stay at the end of the line. To achieve this do not put a space before the slash.
Atlantis 4.3
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
patr
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri May 06, 2016 8:05 pm

Post by patr »

Thank you, Alan.

You are right, when creating a document in which the words remains static in their positions, your suggestion would indeed be best. However, I am creating PDF's both in Letter format and A5 format (the latter for tablet reading) hence the positions of the words will change and I'll have to keep the spaces before and after the forward slash in place.

Thank you!
Robert
Posts: 1890
Joined: Fri Aug 15, 2003 8:27 pm

Post by Robert »

If you go to Unicode Character Finder, and search for “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER”, you’ll see that it is Unicode Code Point U+200C, or HTML Entity 8204; or ‌
This “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER” character can be used to replace the spaces that you insert so painstakingly before and after your forward slashes. And it will achieve what you are after, i.e. hyphenation of the forward slashes.
Now if you type “Alt+8204” in Atlantis, Atlantis will insert a “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER”. However, the Atlantis hyphenation module has currently no support for hyphenation of the “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER” character. So if you type “Alt-8240” followed by forward slash and “Alt-8240” again in Atlantis, Atlantis will insert the “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER” characters but you won’t see any corresponding hyphenation at the end of the lines in Atlantis.
But if you open a document created in Atlantis in MS Word, the “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER” characters will act according to their nature, and your forward slashes will be hyphenated as desired and intended.
Attached “test_slash_hyphenation.docx” was created in latest Atlantis 4.0.2.1. It includes the sequence “Alt-8240” followed by forward slash and “Alt-8240”. I uploaded this “test_slash_hyphenation.docx” to the online converter “ILovePDF” and converted it to PDF at Convert WORD to PDF. This gave me attached “test_slash_hyphenation.pdf”.
If you open “test_slash_hyphenation.pdf” in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, you’ll see that the forward slash is hyphenated at the end of the line.
So you could use this “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER” character to replace the spaces before and after the forward slashes. You won’t see the hyphenation in Atlantis, but you’ll see it in the converted PDF provided that your converter does a good job of the conversion.
Note that you can search for the “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER” character in Atlantis. Simply search for “^8204”.
HTH
Robert
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patr
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri May 06, 2016 8:05 pm

Post by patr »

Now if you type “Alt+8204” in Atlantis, Atlantis will insert a “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER”. However, the Atlantis hyphenation module has currently no support for hyphenation of the “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER” character.
But if you open a document created in Atlantis in MS Word, the “ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER” characters will act according to their nature, and your forward slashes will be hyphenated as desired and intended.
I see! Thank you for this information.

Indeed, neither Atlantis nor SoftMaker TextMaker have support for this type of hyphenation, I tried. I have a portable version of MS Office 2003 that I made myself as support for some older documents I made using it (but I don't want the aggressive file association MS often enforces -- that,and I much prefer Atlantis) and after saving your docx as a doc (in Atlantis) I opened it in MS Word 2003 and even it supports this character/hyphenation!

MSO 2003 has some really good features that I still don't see in other processors, another one being "Select text with similar formatting" which can save some serious time.

Thank you so much, Robert! This will surely help for now. I do hope Atlantis will add support for this, because being able to verify the input of the zero width joiner characters while writing/editing seems only natural.

:)
Robert
Posts: 1890
Joined: Fri Aug 15, 2003 8:27 pm

Post by Robert »

Atlantis already has such a feature as “Select text with similar formatting” within the The Reveal Formatting panel of the Control Board!
Here is how to go about this:
1. Make a selection of the target text.
2. Display the Reveal Formatting panel of the Control Board.
3. Use the drop down at the top of the Reveal Formatting panel to Reveal formatting “of current selection”.
4. The small toolbar located at the bottom of that Control Board panel includes the following commands:
  • Find similar font formatting
    Find similar paragraph formatting
    Find similar font and paragraph formatting
You can even compare the formatting of 2 different text selections.
Please have a look at Commands of the Reveal Formatting panel for details.
HTH
Robert
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