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Two (plus one) Typesetting Characters I Wish I Knew About Sooner

karma

I'd often wondered why AjaxChat sometimes inserts an apparently invisible character that breaks links if one attempted to copy and paste them. Today I was able to select one while using Opera for debugging, thanks to the font it used not covering it. I wasn't really sure what to do with it at first, I don't have any character map-like tools installed and Google search didn't recognize it as a query. Eventually I noticed it was producing search suggestions and among them was ​.

As Wikipedia explains, the character is a

Zero-Width Space
The zero-width space (ZWSP) is a non-printing character used in computerized typesetting to indicate word boundaries to text processing systems when using scripts that do not use explicit spacing, or after characters (such as the slash) that are not followed by a visible space but after which there may nevertheless be a line break. Normally, it is not a visible separation, but it may expand in passages that are fully justified.

It continues with a great demonstration:

Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?Antidisestablishmentarianism?

"On browsers supporting zero-width spaces, resizing the window will re-break the above text only at word boundaries."

Another neat character is the

Soft Hyphen
In computing and typesetting, a soft hyphen (U+00AD soft hyphen, HTML: ­ ­), also called a discretionary hyphen or optional hyphen, is a kind of hyphen used to specify a place in text where a hyphenated break is allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text is re-flowed. The soft hyphen's semantics and HTML implementation are in many ways similar to the zero-width space.

Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­Antidisestablishmentarianism­

Bonus round: check out the Zero-Width Non-Joiner.

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