Tilde not changed to non-breaking space in print draft

Question

Tildes (used in USFMs as non-breaking spaces) disappear when the view is changed in “Preview” view, as expected. However, when a Print Draft PDF is made, the tildes appear as tildes. As a work-around, I created an auxiliary project and changed the tildes to spaces in that project, which is used only to print drafts. But I had expected that these would be invisible. Am I missing some step that would make these disappear?

Answer 1

U+202F provides a Narrow No Break Space (NNBSP). However a good number of fonts do not support the u+202F code point. If that’s the case, it will appear as a square in your Print draft. I therefore recommend using the regular no-break space u+00A0 (NBSP).

If you want a narrow space I recommend using one of the regular narrow spaces u+2006 or u+2009. Both are fairly widely supported and I have never had a problem in Print Draft of there being a line break where one of these is inserted. I suspect that the print draft engine in PT treats them as no-break. I can say for a fact that InDesign treats these as no-break spaces.

Answer 2

It’s quite strange that this is happening since I think that TeX (the brains behind PrintDraft) is what motivated that tilde-as-space idea in the first place.

Instead of digging into the xetex modules and trying to figure out why this is happening, I’ll give you the easy work-around.

If you don’t have a PrintDraftChanges.txt file in the main project folder (not, oddly enough, in the PrintDraft folder), create it.

Add the following line into that. It will make the substitutions on the fly as you do PrintDraft:
“\u007E” > “\u00A0”

[edit: correction as CrazyRocky pointed out I had used the wrong space unicode character]

Comments

Just a quick “me too”, using PT 8.0.100.63.

To us this was a surprise too (I vaguely remember that it worked in PT7 but could be wrong). I can also confirm that the workaround of @mnjames works fine. We need that file PrintDraftChanges.txt anyway for some other magic, so to us this is no problem.

So @Phil you are not missing a step, in fact you even worked too hard (sorry) in creating an aux-project. I can only guess that you will also love the extra possibilities with the print draft changes file.

Answer 3

Thanks to all! Yes, the PrintDraftChanges.txt does it. And I will check out which of the @CrazyRocky narrow spaces the translation team prefers when we get closer to printing. It’s good to know we have some choices to try out in InDesign.

Answer 4

I just read (in an email from Paratext News about using autocorrect) about using “hair spaces” (\u200A) between quote marks. I don’t remember ever hearing the term “hair spaces” before. My question now is, does Paratext (and/or Word, and/or typesetting software) treat “hair spaces” as non-breaking spaces? (I see CrazyRocky’s July 13 message about “the regular narrow spaces u+2006 or u+2009” being treated as no-break spaces, but no mention of u+200A.) I’m just wondering what’s the best thing to use instead of the ugly tilde characters that I’m currently using.
Thanks!

Comments

All of the different size spaces are treated as non-breaking spaces by InDesign. If you want a line to break at a narrow space you actually have to format a regular space as say a 6 point space to make it narrower. Use of hairspaces should be fine. Actually what I do now is to put regular spaces between the quote marks, Then when doing typesetting or uploading the project at the DBL I use changes.txt or DBLChanges.txt to change those spaces to narrow spaces.