Them's the Breaks

James Fritz

Typography is mainly concerned with conditions: how things look, how they’re arranged, how they relate to each other. But this time we’ll look a typographic event: the line ending. Though it leaves its trace, whether created automatically by your program or manually by your own hand, as an entity on the page it’s a bit amorphous. But the appearance of nearly every line of type you set is contingent on how it ends, and you have more control over this than you might guess.
To rein in this discussion to a manageable size, I’m breaking it into two halves. This column will cover non-hyphenated lines; the next installment will delve into how hyphenation works and how you can control it.
The Key to Justification
In typographese, the process of fitting type into lines is called justification. It doesn’t matter whether those lines completely fill the measure (what we call justified margins) or only partly (ragged margins), all type goes through the justification process. The end result is a series of end-of-line decisions.
In general, your software program’s guiding principal is to fit as much type on a line as possible before ending the line and starting a new one. How fully and densely packed those lines are is up to you. In the language of computers (as opposed to type), each line is said to end with a carriage return and a line feed. These terms originally referred to old impact printers, which advanced the paper one line space after each line of type was imaged. In terms of type, the size of a line feed is the leading you’ve specified for your type. It’s also sometimes called a line advance. Lurking inside every one of your fonts are actually commands — “characters” of a sort — for “carriage return” and “line feed.”
You can file the image below under “views you can’t use.” Here, seen from inside a font editor — perhaps for the first time in “print” — is Unicode character 000A (also knows as ASCII 10), the non-glyph knows as a “line feed.”

Justification can be insanely complex, taking into consideration, for example, the ranges in which you’ve allowed the program to stretch or squeeze word and character spaces. That’s also a topic for a future column, so here let’s just look at what happens when your program has filled a line with text as best it can and has to end it and start another.
Lines can end in four ways. Your program can simply say “end the line here,” which effectively inserts a temporary line-break command into the text stream. If the text reflows, this command goes away. The program can also say, “hyphenate this word and then end the line.” This adds a temporary hyphen (called a soft hyphen), which also disappears if it’s no longer need to help end a line.
The other two possibilities are invoked by you. Both are permanent additions to the text stream, and their effect is always visible. One is created when you hit the Return or Enter key, which says, “end the line and the paragraph here.” This is called a hard return. The other is called a soft return, which ends the current line and starts another, but without starting a new paragraph. The near-universal keyboard command for it is Shift-Return. This is a very useful command, as you’ll soon see.
There are many legal line-ending opportunities. A word space is most common. In a line that ends at a word space — either by your hand or your program’s — that space is not set, but it’s still in the text stream. Although you can’t see it (the word before it can butt up flush against the right-hand margin), think of it as existing before the line break; if it followed the break, it would be pushed down to the next line, where it would cause a small indent.
This is the source of a very common typesetting error, whether you end lines with a soft or a hard return. Look at the following centered lines:

See something wrong? The second line appears off-center to the right. This happened because in breaking the lines by hand, I inserted the return before the space between the words Towers and Invites. This pushed the word space down to start the next line, indenting it by about a quarter of an em. This is all too easy to overlook. A space before a return will not be set; a space after a return will start the following line.
Other legal line-breaking opportunities are after a hard hyphen (one that’s been typed into text), a slash (also knows as a solidus or virgule), and em dashes (although not all programs will break lines here).
Many Happy Returns
That said, you can force any line to end wherever you want by manually inserting a soft return (Shift-Return). You can use soft returns, for example, to create flush-left lists in the midst of paragraphs formatted for a first-line indent, as in the following example. (I’ve turned on “show invisibles” to reveal the non-printing aspects of the text; all text-processing and page-layout programs have some equivalent of this feature.)

In the sample above, ending each list item with a soft return prevents the next line from indenting. Using a hard return — hitting the Return key, as at the end of the text — tells the program that you’re ending one paragraph and starting a new one on the next line, bringing on any first line indent associated with it.
Soft returns allow you to create long and structurally complex passages of text that are effectively one paragraph. This is a key to using formatting tools such as InDesign’s nested styles, which cycle through a sequence of character styles in the process of formatting a paragraph. Using this technique, you could structure a whole table of contents, for example, as a list contained in a single paragraph. The whole TOC could be formatted with one click on a single paragraph style, as seen here:

Having control over where your lines break also extends to controlling where they don’t break. To this end, all fonts also include a non-breaking space, which has the same width as a word space but isn’t a legal place to break a line. Words or characters linked by a non-breaking space will travel together as a unit, never to be divided at line’s end. In this column, I use this all the time, when, for example I cite a character by placing it in parentheses, like so: ( ). In this case, padding the backslash with non-breaking spaces gives the character some room to breathe and also assures that neither of the parentheses will be orphaned on its own line.
In Word, the keyboard shortcut for a non-breaking space is Alt/Option-space. InDesign (Type > Insert White Space > Nonbreaking Space) and QuarkXPress (Utilities > Insert Character> Special (nonbreaking) > Standard Space) send you off on a menu crawl to find this handy mechanism. Create your own keyboard shortcut for it if you can.
Bring on the Hyphens
Next time, we’ll look at how your program hyphenates — a key element in making line-ending decisions — and how to control the process, combining some of the tips described here to assure yourself nothing but happy endings.