MadCap Software Forums

Hi all,
how can I insert a non-breaking space in a variable? Via shortcut it does not work.

Good question. Made me interrupt my day until I figured out the answer. I can see lots of uses for special characters in variables.

I haven't had success trying to add one with the user interface, but you can add anything you want to the flvar file. You'll find that in your project folder, MyVariables.flvar. It's XML, so that controls what it can contain. It won't let you use the character name ( ) but it will let you use the hexadecimal code, &x#A0;

So, for example: You can find a list of character values at the following wikipedia link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_X ... references
For example, let's say that you want an ellipsis. Looking it up, we find code U+2026 (8230), where the useful bit is the number 2026. In your variables file, you can write that as &x#2026;

Hi,
many thanks for your workaround, I will try it and whow: I can´t belive that I cannot make a non-breaking variable directly via Flare

BedfordWriter wrote:Good question. Made me interrupt my day until I figured out the answer. I can see lots of uses for special characters in variables.

What are you thinking?

ok, nice, thanks a lot, piece of cake, I´ve also change my non-breaking hyphen with  

Pardon me for bringing up the dead.

We're in a situation where, for branding and aesthetic reason, we can't break between certain words. If we try editing the .fltar target file in a text editor, putting in the entity code (even as hex) causes Flare to balk at the &. We're running Flare 12.

Can someone confirm they've been able to insert an HTML entity like a non-breaking space in a variable and had the PDF build accordingly?

Thanks.

I actually did this just today (without looking at the thread, just tried it) and it worked perfectly.

riboslavin wrote:Pardon me for bringing up the dead.

We're in a situation where, for branding and aesthetic reason, we can't break between certain words. If we try editing the .fltar target file in a text editor, putting in the entity code (even as hex) causes Flare to balk at the &. We're running Flare 12.

Can someone confirm they've been able to insert an HTML entity like a non-breaking space in a variable and had the PDF build accordingly?

Thanks.

If doing this in a variable isn't working for you, could you instead use a snippet? You can insert non-breaking spaces in a snippet easily, and then insert the snippet as snippet text in your topics.

If you manually insert a   into your variables be aware that the Flare editor will automatically strip it out again the next time you edit any of the other variables in that variable set.