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Subject:Re: WinHelp 4 and strange line breaks? From:"Richard G. Combs" <richard -dot- combs -at- voyanttech -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 4 Oct 2002 13:47:38 -0600
Geoff Hart reports that in WinHelp:
> when the help window is resized to precisely the wrong size, the
> text wraps after the apostrophe, leaving (in my example) l' on one line
and
> the word "apostrophe" on the next line.
>
> Same problem is occurring with French quotes (<< followed by a space and
>>
> preceded by a space, only with the actual chevron characters rather than
> greater than and less than signs). I suppose I could always drop the space
> between the quotes and the word, but that's not correct French typography.
It's been a few years since I created WinHelp, but my recollection concurs
with Dana Worley. To elaborate, WinHelp will wrap a line at any font change,
not just at the end of a word. If your line ends with "...click OK." and OK
is bold, but the period after it isn't, when you size the window just right,
the period wraps to the next line:
...click *OK*
.
I'm not sure Dana's idea of a "dummy" character style will help; it seems to
me that the text string in question must _actually be_ the same format in
order to avoid the problem. In any case, I don't know why it would happen
after the apostrophe unless the apostrophe is from a different font, special
character set, or something.
In any case, the French quotes (chevron) problem would exist even in the
absence of this bug. The lines are wrapping at a space, after all, just as
they're supposed to (in English at least; maybe Word-Francais implements a
different algorithm). IIRC, Word doesn't support non-breaking spaces.
FWIW, Geoff, anyone who's spent much time looking at WinHelp has encountered
such inappropriate line wrapping many times and will know it's not your
fault. :-)
Richard
------
Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Voyant Technologies, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT voyanttechDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT freeDASHmarketDOTnet
303-777-0436
------
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