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Inspiring
April 3, 2023
Question

Adobe Illustrator does not use standard Non-breaking-space character. And this is a problem.

  • April 3, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 994 views

Yes, there is an obscure way to force a space not to break. (Choose No Break from the Character panel menu.) This sort of works, but from a typographical point of view it is a PowerPoint way of working.

 

The main problem is that Ai does not recognise special characters for non-breaking spaces. If you paste text from Id that contains non-breaking spaces, Ai just treats them as normal spaces. (However, when non-rpinting characters are displayed, there is no little dot to represent a normal space - there is just space without any non-printing character).

 

In Id, GREP could be used to automatically insert non-breaking spaces at certain places. Since Ai has this obscure way (selecting No Break in the Character Panel menu), and Ai does not handle GREP, inserting non-breaking spaces at specific places in the text cannot be automated.

 

I have been squeezing ChatGPT for several hours to get some sort of partially usable script, but not a chance.

 

Please Adobe, teach Ai to use non-breaking spaces so that it can work with text in a non-ancient way! Thanks.

 

Or if you know a script, I would be glad if you drop me a line...

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2 replies

Sergey Osokin
Inspiring
April 4, 2023

Check Nobr-auto.jsx script by Daani Rika  https://github.com/daani-rika/Illustrator-scripts#nobr-autojsx

It supports setting a non-breaking space either in the selected text or automatically in the text frame between each 1-2 character word and the next word.

To add support for the Latin alphabet
1) Download the script
2) Open jsx in a text editor
3) In square brackets add a-zA-Z as

 

var grep = new RegExp("\\s(((([a-zA-ZА-Яа-яёЁЇїІіЄєҐґ]){1,2})(\\s[a-zA-ZА-Яа-яёЁЇїІіЄєҐґ])+)+)", "ig");

 

 

Monika Gause
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 3, 2023

Please post a feature request: https://illustrator.uservoice.com

Zed 248Author
Inspiring
April 3, 2023

Will do, thank you!