Unwanted single-letter conjunctions and numbers at the end of the line

[PanTulipan]

In Polish, we have a typesetting rule that single-letter conjunctions should not be left alone at the end of the line. The same applies in general to numbers (unless, of course, they are followed by a full stop). Therefore, a non-breaking space is used in such cases. However, the non-breaking space has a fixed width and it looks bad in justified text, so auto-inserting them is not the best option and the text must be visually checked for such cases. According to information from Claude AI, it’s not possible to create a Python script that would do exactly that as it’s only the text editing application that knows where the end of the text line is. Is there some workaround for this?

[cwolan]

JFTR:
tdf#143380 (Polish language: Avoid putting conjunctions like “i” “a” “o” at the end of a line).

[cwolan]

@PanTulipan

However, the non-breaking space has a fixed width and it looks bad in justified text, so auto-inserting them is not the best option and the text must be visually checked for such cases.

Release Notes 24.2:

[PanTulipan]

Unfortunately, it works only for LibreOffice - I opened a file with such spaces in MS Word and it sees such space as a non-breaking space preceded by two double-walled rectangles.

[EarnestAl]

I think that MS Word is worse at opening .odt than Writer is at opening .docx. Save a copy as .docx and let Word manage the spacing there; when saved as .docx the gap is exported as a non-breaking space.

Or choose a font with the other types of spaces included, see comment 9 of the bug report in the release notes, 41652 – "NO-BREAK SPACE" (U+00A0) interpreted as fixed-width space

and the most commonly used word processor renders all spaces apart from U+0020 and U+00A0 as boxes if the font doesn’t define them (LibreOffice uses the glyphs from a substitution font)

[ajlittoz]

There are other space characters with no-break property in Unicode. You could try U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE.

You can easily insert it with Insert>Formatting Mark>Narrow No-break Space or Alt+Shift+Space. If under MacOS, check keyboard shortcut.

PS: when asking here, always mention OS name, exact LO version and save format (the latter is very important as most suggestions are only valid and stable for .odt).

EDIT: the post mentioned below by @PanTulipan is

Variable width non-breaking space

No. Only U+0020 SPACE is taken into account by the justification engine. All other spaces are rendered with the width defined in the font. You should have described the specific use case(+) in which you need a U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE to expand. I don’t see where it is needed as such a space is use to prevent line break between a word and the next element, usually a punctuation. Frequently, text pasted from the internet has ordinary spaces replaced by no-break spaces. This is a typographical erro…

[PanTulipan]

You inspired me to look further and I found your post in a topic on the (non-existing) variable-width non-breaking space - the solution is to insert word joiners between the prepositions/numbers and ordinary spaces. Thank you!

EDIT: unfortunately, the set “character+word joiner+space” is not perfect - it does the job in most of, but not all cases. Adding e.g. zero-width or hairline non-breaking space does not help and currently it’s only the regular non-breaking space that seems to work there.