{"id":959,"date":"2020-04-30T16:35:51","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T23:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/?p=959"},"modified":"2020-09-10T12:18:34","modified_gmt":"2020-09-10T19:18:34","slug":"line-wraps-and-the-zero-width-joiner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/line-wraps-and-the-zero-width-joiner\/","title":{"rendered":"Line Wraps and the Zero-Width Joiner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes the most exciting thing about an iOS update is all the new emojis. In recent history the new emojis in iOS 13.2<\/a> included several interesting characters:<\/p>\n

\"sloth\"ice\"ringed<\/p>\n

That last one is technically called the Ringed Planet emoji<\/a>; but let’s get real, that’s Saturn. Even in emoji-form the cosmos is beautiful. These photos of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe<\/a> are particularly stunning in their detail.<\/p>\n

What does this have to do with line wrapping? We’ll get to that. First let’s explain a technical detail about emojis. Most Unicode characters and emojis have a distinct Unicode code point (aka character code). Each code tells software what character to display. The number 127823 is an apple, while 129411 is a turkey. But sometimes a new emoji will not have a new code. Instead the emoji is designated using a composite of existing codes. For example, the female chef emoji does not have a distinct code. Instead it combines the woman emoji with the frying pan emoji:<\/p>\n

\"how<\/p>\n

How does does an emoji do that in text? By using a zero-width joiner<\/i> character between its constituent characters. That way software knows to display all the codes together as a single glyph or image on screen. This joiner trick is used for a variety of purposes like skin tone and gender modifiers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now to the part where we explain how the zero-width joiner character can help your writing. In certain situations you might consider inserting a joiner character to change where line wrapping occurs. The joiner acts as a signal to the text layout engine that the adjacent characters should be joined. You can think of the joiner like a glob of glue that keeps its neighbors together. The characters won’t display a single image as with emoji, but rather they will be kept together on the same line.<\/p>\n

Consider the following example text:
\n\"text<\/p>\n

The page margins may cause an undesirable wrapping point at the slash, so the words “when” and “if” are split across lines like so:
\n\"text<\/p>\n

To prevent that you can place the insertion point after the slash character and insert a zero-width joiner character. That instructs text layout to keep the slash character together with the “i” in “if” like so:
\n\"fixed<\/p>\n

To insert the joiner character in Nisus Writer Pro<\/a> you can use the menu Insert > Special Character > Spaces > Zero Width Joiner<\/i>, or use our customizable Special Characters palette<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes the most exciting thing about an iOS update is all the new emojis. In recent history the new emojis in iOS 13.2 included several interesting characters: That last one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":993,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions\/993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nisus.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}