Soft return ?

> No Break can be just as bad as a soft return in certain situations.

That would have to be a rather singular situation and/or the result of rather indiscriminate use of No Break.

Many No Breaks, even to shape a rag, are applied to words that could logically stay together under any situation. Generally the worst they can do is make the rag as bad as it was before they were used in the first place and they have to be at the end a line to do even that. Soft returns on the other hand will always cause problems when they come anywhere in the text other than at the end of the line where they were put: they are much more disruptive and several in a row can throw a whole layout out of whack.

Bottom line even if No Break could be a problem in 1 out of 100 times that would make it 1% as bad as using soft returns.

No Break can be just as bad as a soft return in certain situations. At least with a soft return with invisibles on you can see what is going on when text flow isn't behaving as it should. No Break doesn't show up you can waste several minutes trying to work out why text doesn't appear to be flowing properly because subsequent edits to the copy have made existing No Breaks wrong.

> I hope I am clear on explaining some of these uses.

Clear enough but all bad. I'm adding to jongware's comments.

Paragraph spacing should be controlled with paragraph spacing and a new style. Rag is much better controlled with No Break, and even that should be used with discretion. Hyphenation should be controlled with H&J and discretionary hyphens. If text is to be indented, use an indent. And there is absolutely no reason for a soft return after the first line of a bulleted paragraph.

I'm with the Captain, I never (hardly) use soft returns. If I were asked for legitimate uses one would would be to give a contextual break to a headline. Another would be to break lines in an address - sometimes.

Yep, I'll drink to that :-)

>You might have a short word like "in" or "of" that would look better in the next line rather than hanging out at the right end. Say your paragraph has a first line indent; a soft return will let you carry on in the same paragraph, whereas if you enter a ordinary carriage return you will get an indent where you don't want it.

But when­ever the text is re-formatted (due to text editing, usually), the soft return will
i keep on break­ing
at that exact point. In this case I prefer to either insert a non-break­ing space between the small word and the next one, or select the small word and (part of) the next word and apply 'No Break'.

You might argue "yeah but that's about the same, innit?" since these texts will not ever be brokenjust as with a Soft Return. It's not the same: if the text re-runs, the fix becomes un­notice­able, and when­ever it re-runs
i again
and the joined words come near the mar­gins, they'll keep on stick­ing to­gether. Just the way you want.

The whole point of a soft return (or forced line break) is to move a word down into the next line without creating a new paragraph.
This usually happens if a column of text is aligned left and the right edge is unnecessarily ragged. (Old-school typographers often call this "ragged right" instead of aligned left.) You might have a short word like "in" or "of" that would look better in the next line rather than hanging out at the right end.
Say your paragraph has a first line indent; a soft return will let you carry on in the same paragraph, whereas if you enter a ordinary carriage return you will get an indent where you don't want it.

I disagree with NTC Ann when she talks about using tabs for the front edges of bulleted lists. It's much better to use a combination of paragraph indent and minus value first line indent and save it as a paragraph style. Tabs can be a nuisance if you need to re-flow text.

I'm with Kath on this - hanging indents is for that.

Astronauts love soft returns.

>And say you have a bullet and a space on the L... and then when you run the text to line #2 and below... you want the text to line up under the beginning of the first work instead of under the bullet at the beginning.

Isn't that what hanging indents are for?

Actual guidelines? Here are a couple suggestions that might help.

If you want to bring your line of text to the next line without a hard return such as if you have your document set up so that say you have 1p or 1" in between paragraphs and you don't want to have that 1p or 1" space before (or space after) your next line but you want to just continue your text as one block. Or if your paragraph has an awkward rag to one side (say one line really sticks out far and you want to bring a word to the next line so the one side looks better... soft return).

Or if you have a lot of hyphens and you don't want them and you've kerned and it hasn't solved the hyphen problem, then you can use a soft return to put the beginning part of the word on the next line. (Personally I try to avoid all hyphens when ever possible.)

Or if when you've used a clipping path on an object and the text just doesn't sit right and you need to adjust the words in a paragraph so they look better... you can use the soft return in between words so that the rag on that one side looks more attractive.

If you want to line up text under an area on the left where the text doesn't go all the way to the right in a box. Say you have the text 3" in from the right side of the text box but for some reason, you are not using the indent tool.

And say you have a bullet and a space on the L... and then when you run the text to line #2 and below... you want the text to line up under the beginning of the first work instead of under the bullet at the beginning.... never use spaces to line up anything please... use tabs or in this case, after you have soft returned at the end of that 1st line... click in front of the first word after the space and bullet and hit "command and \"... then the text will line up for you under where you want it to line up. But it won't do that if you have done a hard return.

I hope I am clear on explaining some of these uses.