Last modified: 2006-06-30 14:42:29 UTC
For various technical terms, such as m-RNA, t-RNA, n-butane, µ-meter, (alpha)-helix, etc., it is visually disruptive to have a break after the hyphen if it happens to fall at the end of a line of text. I was revising the article on Genetics today, and "m-RNA" (and others) broke, as I expected, at the end of a line. Microsoft Word has some internal code such that typing Command+Shift+hyphen produces a nonbreaking hyphen — useful to keep (especially) a single-character prefix attached to the main string. I wasn't able to find a wiki bug report relative to this. (Bugzilla queries came up with references to m-dash and n-dash parsing.) I haven't done a search to find out if this is a Unicode character, but it would be helpful if wiki had a procedure (or patch) to allow one to enter a nonbreaking hyphen. I don't think this is Macintosh-specific. I use Safari (1.3.1), still under Mac OS X (10.3.9), but the "problem" also appeared with Internet Explorer:Mac (5.2). David Shear dshear@austin.rr.com
There's a template for this in use on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Nobr Usage like {{nobr|m-RNA}}
http://purl.net/net/ucode/2011 might also help.
