Non-breaking space for word couples

[Philipp Lenssen]

I would like to know what others do to prevent line-breaks, using  

For example, the guidelines for the company have certain words (like
"Model XY", where "Model" and "XY" shouldn't be separated. Fair enough,
I use the non-breaking space for that.

How about things like:

- 10 to 100 KM/H
- 7 to 8 years

and so on?
Or maybe this is a question for an English-usage newsgroup...

[William Tasso]

Philipp Lenssen wrote:

...the guidelines for the company have certain words (like
"Model XY", where "Model" and "XY" shouldn't be separated. Fair
enough, I use the non-breaking space for that.

How about things like:

- 10 to 100 KM/H
- 7 to 8 years

and so on?
css: {white-space:nowrap}
Or maybe this is a question for an English-usage newsgroup...

if you want to know what, when, where or why, but a web group is probably
more suitable if you want to know how

--
William Tasso - http://WilliamTasso.com

[Andreas Prilop]

On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

- 10 to 100 KM/H

What should this mean? If you mean "100 kilometres per hour"
then write "100 km/h".

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, Aug 19, Andreas Prilop inscribed on the eternal scroll:

On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

- 10 to 100 KM/H

What should this mean?

Could be a typo for Mega Kelvins per Henry. :-}

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Philipp Lenssen <ph*************@bb-k.com> wrote:

For example, the guidelines for the company have certain words
(like "Model XY", where "Model" and "XY" shouldn't be separated.
Fair enough, I use the non-breaking space for that.
Yep. But for longer expressions, we may need to consider the pros and
cons of preventing line breaks.
How about things like:

- 10 to 100 KM/H
- 7 to 8 years

and so on?
Personally I don't care much, except for headings and emphasized texts
where the appearance is important. For the latter,
"7&amp;to&amp;8 years" is probably sufficient - trying to prevent line
breaks where they would really disturb.
Or maybe this is a question for an English-usage newsgroup...

Well, similar questions arise for other languages, and notations like
"100 km/h" are really not English but belong to a special system of
notations, denotation of quantities, where the SI rules should be
applied. The document "Guide for the Use of the International System of
Units (SI)", http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/contents.html
can be useful reading, though it's somewhat anglocentric (e.g., in
strongly recommending the word "to" instead of a range dash) and
somewhat over-theoretical, especially when it frowns upon a notation
like "70 to 100 km/h", telling us to write "70 km/h to 100 km/h"
or "(70 to 100) km/h".

Anyway, a line break between a number and an SI unit is clearly
undesirable, because they belong tightly together (and people often
omit the space between them for this reason), so I would replace at
last the last space in "70 to 100 km/h" by a no-break space.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Jonathan Snook]

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tut.fi> wrote in message
news:Xn*****************************@193.229.0.31. ..

Philipp Lenssen <ph*************@bb-k.com> wrote:

- 7 to 8 years

Personally I don't care much, except for headings and emphasized texts
where the appearance is important. For the latter,
"7&amp;to&amp;8 years" is probably sufficient - trying to prevent line

Just to nitpick (and be a pain in the ass), but I assume you meant
"7&nbsp;to&nbsp;8 years".

;-)

Jonathan

[Philipp Lenssen]

In article <bh************@ID-139074.news.uni-berlin.de>, ng*@tbdata.com
says...

Philipp Lenssen wrote:

...the guidelines for the company have certain words (like
"Model XY", where "Model" and "XY" shouldn't be separated. Fair
enough, I use the non-breaking space for that.

How about things like:

- 10 to 100 KM/H
- 7 to 8 years

and so on?

css: {white-space:nowrap}

Thanks for the CSS reminder. The client uses Netscape 4. I don't even
want to try "advanced" CSS. Of course, if anyone now screams out "this
works in Netscape 4", there would still be the original question where
to put the non-breakers:

- 7 to 8 years
- 7 to 8&nbsp;years
- 7&nbsp;to&nbsp;8 years

.... and so on.

[Philipp Lenssen]

In article <Xn*****************************@193.229.0.31>,
jk******@cs.tut.fi says...

(...)
Anyway, a line break between a number and an SI unit is clearly
undesirable, because they belong tightly together (and people often
omit the space between them for this reason), so I would replace at
last the last space in "70 to 100 km/h" by a no-break space.

Yes, that's what I did so far.

And to the others, yes, I meant km/h not KM/H.