Re: Non-breaking hyphens and web browsers

From: Mark E. Davis (markdavis@ispchannel.com)
Date: Sun Nov 07 1999 - 19:55:16 EST


You can search for Hyphens in the Unicode Character Database.
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/versions/enumeratedversions.html#Latest

You will find:
002D;HYPHEN-MINUS
This is the ambiguous character that could be a hyphen or a minus.

00AD;SOFT HYPHEN
Is invisible, except at the end of lines. Used for fine-tuning automatic
hyphenation.

2010;HYPHEN
The unambiguous hyphen.

2011;NON-BREAKING HYPHEN
Is used for a hyphen when you don't want it to break.

Hyphens are not to be confused with the mathematical operator:
2212;MINUS SIGN

Or the dashes (which are the wrong width for a hyphen):
2012;FIGURE DASH
2013;EN DASH
2014;EM DASH
2015;HORIZONTAL BAR

[There are some variants of the hyphen-minus:
FE63;SMALL HYPHEN-MINUS;Pd;0;ET;<small> 002D;;;;N;;;;;
FF0D;FULLWIDTH HYPHEN-MINUS;Pd;0;ET;<wide> 002D;;;;N;;;;;]

I'm surprised you were not able to find this out from the book; was the
information not clear enough?

Mark

Ben Yenko-Martinka wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I saw some earlier postings on non-breaking hyphens earlier.
> I have been wrestling with the same problem in tables in web pages to
> prevent wrapping in cells containing hyphens.
>
> While the en-dash "&#150;" (decimal rather than hex values) appears to
> work fine in Netscape, it allows wrapping in Microsoft Internet
> Explorer.
> Furthermore, while Homesite (my web design tool makes this code
> available for en-dash, it appears in the range of unassigned codes in
> Homesite's own "complete" Character Entity Reference for ISO Latin-1.
> In that reference, the en-dash is listed with two allowable codes:
> "&#8211;" and "&ndash;".
> These, however, are recognized by Microsoft IE but not by Netscape (at
> least not in the Arial font which they are in IE). These do not prevent
> breaking/wrapping on the hyphens (en-dashes) in IE either though.
>
> Another character code I discovered, however, "&#8722;" or "&minus;"
> does prevent breaking/wrapping in IE, though these also are not
> recognized by Netscape, (again at least not in the Arial font which they
> are in IE).
>
> Can someone please tell me what is going on with browser support of
> character encoding?
>
> Thank you!
> Ben Yenko-Martinka



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