- Created by Unknown User (malley), last modified by Scott Johnson on Apr 04, 2014
Description
What are Soft Hyphens, how are they used, and how can Loftware make use of Soft Hyphens?
Explanation
Soft Hyphens are hyphens available through the Character Map utility (charmap.exe) that do not print. They can be added to data using Keystroke Alt-0173. You will notice that the cursor does not move, but if you were to backspace through that location you would notice that an extra backspace key stroke is needed to remove the Soft Hyphen.
They are used in data where legitimate line breaks can be inserted in long strings of characters. For example; long chemical names like ribulosebisphosphatecarboxylaseoxygenase.
Imagine if the above 40-character word needed to be printed in an area that only accommodated 25 characters per line. The output from paragraph would be:
ribulosebisphosphatecarbo xylaseoxygenase
The break at this point is not permitted so the data is formatted with Soft Hyphens to indicate appropriate break locations without changing how the data prints.
The following example shows how the data would look if the Soft Hyphens were replaced by standard Hyphens.
ribulose-bisphosphate-carboxylase-oxygenase
You can use a field level script routine to search for the Soft Hyphens using the Soft Hyphen hex value "\u00AD".
The script can then count the number of characters and break the lines out at the appropriate location changing the output to:
ribulosebisphosphate carboxylaseoxygenase
Note: The full script is not included here due to the complexity of the script and focus of this article.
Related Articles
-
Page:Lower-Case Alpha Characters Not Printing (Loftware Print Server Family Knowledge Base)
-
Page:Backslash Character Does Not Print On Zebra 105se (Loftware Print Server Family Knowledge Base)
-
Page:Printing Fixed Text Fields Using International Character Sets (Loftware Print Server Family Knowledge Base)
-
Page:Odd Number Of Characters In Interleaved 2 Of 5 Bar Code (Loftware Print Server Family Knowledge Base)
-
Page:Error Alias Contains Invalid Characters (Loftware Print Server Family Knowledge Base)
Article Number
2014010
Versions
LLM/LPSVersion 9.5 an above
Environment
All supported installation environments.