line wrapping after cross reference (bug?)

[garyjgeoaccess]

Hi. Seems I've heard of this bug (?) before. But I don't remember the workaround. Does a workaround exist?

Here's the problem:

Some of our cross-references are in parentheses, such as this ...
(see "About This Product" on page 1).

However, if either the open parenthesis or the close parenthesis comes at the end of the line, you'll get a parenthesis widowed/orphaned, like this:

asdf sf sfsd asdfsafa sa dasf asd fs (
see "About This Product" on page 1).

OR

(see "About This Product" on page 1
). adfasdf asdfasdfasdf asdfasdf as

This bug (?) is easy to recreate.

Is this a known bug?

Is there a workaround?

Thanks.

[garyjgeoaccess]

Same thing happens without the parentheses.

You can get a line break between a cross reference and the period at the end of a sentence:

adfasadf adfadf adad adf. For more information, see "About This Bug" on page 1
. adfasdf asdfasdf asdfasdfasdf asdfasdf asdfasdf sfdasdf.

[LTinker68]

It's a bug that's tied into something else. That is, it's not specific to cross-references. The problem is that Flare is looking at the page code when it's determining where to word-wrap lines or orphan/widow the content. So instead of ignoring the tags and page code as code, it's counting them as actual (content) text. Same thing happens if you apply a span tag around some text but not the period that follows the text.

Make sure you submit a bug report at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx. The more people who report the problem the sooner it'll get fixed.

[garyjgeoaccess]

Thanks, Lisa.

I just submitted a bug report.

[garyjgeoaccess]

Here's my workaround for this bug. It's not a perfect workaround. Do you have a better solution?

I've created a new style. It looks like this:

span.nowrap { white-space: nowrap;}

I then select the cross-reference and the punctuation (comma, period, parenthesis, etc.), including the space after the punctuation, and apply the style (Format > Pick Style > span.nowrap).

The downside to using "white-space: nowrap":
This text will no longer abide the width of its container. It will potentially exceed the right side of text boxes.

Because this style is being applied because only ONE character is being orphaned, it's difficult for readers to notice that the text line is actually exceeding the right side of its container. However, if at a later date, you add more text in front of the cross reference, the text is subject to exceeding the right side of the container by a very noticeable degree.

Do you have a better solution?

[LTinker68]

My workaround was to just insert a soft line-break (</br>) before the text that I wanted to stay with the punctuation. I then conditioned out the line-break for online output. Or reworded the sentence slightly until the punctuation stayed with the span or other tag.

[garyjgeoaccess]

I thought this bug sounded familiar ...

bobmoon started a thread on this subject on 5 May 2009.
Thread name: PDF line wrapping/breaking incorrectly.
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... =10&t=9020

He reports that MadCap support has both confirmed the bug and entered it as item 29097 in their development database.

Note: At first, this seemed to me like a minor bug, but the more I think about it, the more troubling it seems. You don't really see this bug until you do PDF output. Then you have to find and fix all the orphaned punctuation. This is particularly problematic for me because I'm trying to eliminate all of the post output tweaking. We need to be able to confidently generate PDFs without incurring additional topic tweaks. The sooner this bug is fixed the better. If you haven't reported it as a bug, please do. The more people they hear from, the greater the chance they'll actually fix this bug. Thanks.