Reply To: Grep styles with No Break

It is rather odd. You are sure there are no other codes involved? (Soft line breaks, or non-breaking spaces, to name a few that could cause this.)

Nope — well, fairly sure of a “nope”. As I understand the paragraph composer, on your strange 3-liner it ought to settle for at least 2 fairly equal lines, followed by whatever remains. The “balance ragged lines” option forces the behavior you propose, but it's highly inappropriate for list of names (if only because it might decide to put each name on a line of its own, just because there is one long name in the list).

Theoretically, you ought the exact same behavior if you replace space-not-after-a-comma with a non-breaking space. Your GREP style method is superior since it doesn't need anything else; but can you try and see if it yields the same result on that paragraph?

(Footnote: it might also work to switch to the Single-line composer. Perhaps the very intelligent Paragraph Composer does get confused by this …)