Between a Doc and a Hard Space: How to insert non-breaking spaces

Google Docs is a powerful word processing tool with so many useful features for educators, students, and everyone. As awesome as those are, however, there are still some things that Google Docs can't do, or perhaps just can't do as well as other tools.

Recently I received an email from someone asking how to insert a "hard space" into a Google Doc (or sometimes just called a "non-breaking space").

In short this is a special space character that prevents the words on either side of it from being separated by a line break. When text wraps to the next line, the words connected by the non-breaking space stay together on the same line. It's useful for keeping things like names, dates, measurements or other word pairs from being split apart.

It turns out you can do this in Google Docs, but it is not a simple task. I was excited to dig in and discover how this can be done (as well as create an exceptionally punny title for this blog post).

See below for direction on how to add a "non-breaking" or "hard" space in Docs when needed.

🤔 The Problem

First let's take a quick look at the problem that a non-breaking space helps to solve. Let's say we have some text that includes a measurement such as "20 cm". Even though there is a space between the "20" and the "cm" you probably would not want those two pieces to be separated on different lines like this:

Instead the "20 cm" text should stay together when there is a line break like this:

💡 The Solution

Although Google Docs does support non-breaking spaces, it is not a simple process. Other tools make this quick and easy with a keystroke such as pressing the shift key and the space bar at the same time.

Not so with Docs. With Docs we actually have to use "Special Characters" to make this work. Here are the steps:

• Position the cursor where you want to insert the non-breaking space (or "hard space").
• Click "Insert" in the top menu bar, then "Special Characters".
• The "Insert special characters" pop-window will open.
• In the search box type "no break space".
• You should get three results which are:
• NO-BREAK SPACE
• NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE
• ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE

• Click on the first one which will be NO-BREAK SPACE
• This will insert the non-breaking space.
• You can now close the Special Characters window.

Once you have the non-breaking space in your document, the text on either side of it will stay together on line breaks.

Also, if you need to add more non-breaking spaces in your document, you won't have to go through that entire process again. Instead you can simply select the non-breaking space you already inserted, and then copy and paste it elsewhere in the document as needed.

So at the moment that is the method I found to work. If you come across an easier or alternate method, please share your approach. I would love to hear your ideas.

Post by Eric Curts

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