This InDesign tip on breaking lines at em spaces and en spaces with discretionary line breaks was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on November 10, 2016.
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InDesign treats special white space characters (such as em and en spaces) as nonbreaking. If you want to allow them to break at the end of the line, insert a Discretionary Line Break (from the Insert Line Break submenu, under the Type menu).
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on November 15, 2016
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Question with the discretionary line breaks. Is this typically inserted directly after the em/en space characters? Would you recommend the same for em/en dashes?
Cmd-Alt-Shift-N on OSX! ;-)
(^/)
I use xTags a alot and it’s nice that there is a special character that is inserted so it can break (when I tag a file or have it keyboarded).
This tip is cool, though. It’s what I’ve done on occasion, but I always wondered if it was the right or wrong way.
Oh David–how come you don’t have a keyboard shortcut for discretionary line break?