Layout Control Characters

How to quote long URLs in Word documents

A note by David Gibson (09-Jun-2025)

You will already be familiar with some of Word's layout control characters, such as using shift-return to force a new line (or, if you are in find-and-replace, caret-lowercase-L. To further examples are ctrl-hyphen to insert a 'soft' (i.e. optional) hyphen, and ctrl-shift-hyphen to insert a non-breaking hyphen. Note: in Word 365, since late 2024, those shortcuts are ctrl-alt-hyphen and shift-alt-hyphen.

Two layout control characters that you might not be familar with are the no-width optional break and no-width non-break. There is a particular use for no-width optional break when quoting URLs in Word documents, and no-width non-break is useful when you need to control Word's default behaviour regarding en-dashes and other variations on the hyphen; and when you are writing equations that Word insists on breaking in the wrong place.

There is a difficulty in quoting long URLs that cover multiple lines, because Word needs to be told where to break the URL to fit the line. If you put in manual line breaks and you later re-write the paragraph, you can end up with line breaks in the wrong places – which you might not notice until it is too late. For this reason, I sometimes separate parts of a URL with a space. That is less prone to causing layout errors but it is still not ideal becaue, if someone pastes the URL from your PDF, it will contain unwanted spaces. This is avoided by using Word's no-width optional break, which allows you to indicate where you would like Word to consider adding a line break. You could, for example, follow each occurance of slash with no-width optional break.

Word's no-width optional break is listed in the Special Characters menu. It does not have a default shortcut key, but you can add one from the Special Characters dialogue. I have set ctrl-alt-space to mean no-width optional break on my PC. That is similar to the built-in ctrl-shift-space for non-breaking space. The Special Characters menu can be displayed via keyboard shortcuts as follows.

• In Microsoft 365 — alt-N U M alt-P
• In In Word 2003 — alt-I S alt-P

The two characters that Word calls no-width optional break and no-width non-break are, in fact, the Unicode characters zero width non-joiner (ZWNJ) and zero-width joiner (ZWJ). As HTML entities they can be referred to as ‌ and ‍ or, in Unicode, U+200C andU+200D. To enter them on your numeric keypad, in Word – which is the way I find most convenient to insert en-dashes and other non-keyboard characters – use alt-8204 and alt-8205.

When Word displays a document on screen it represents each layout control character by its own particular special icon known, in Word, as a formatting mark. But when Word renders a document for printing, it replaces layout control characters with their computed printable characters. So, for example, a soft hyphen (represented on-screen as ¬) would be rendered either as nothing if it was not required, or as hyphen-newline.

That means that if someone pastes from a PDF that you have created using no-width optional break, the URL may contain new-line characters, which could still be a nuisance, but probably less of a nuisance than inserted spaces would cause. However, this is still not completely ideal, and – ideally – clickable URLs in documents should be created using Word's hyperlink facility (ctrl-K). Your PDF generator should be configured to recognise Word hyperlinks and convert them to clickable URLs in the PDF. note that clickable hyperlins are in addition to using layout control characters to make the printed output look the most acceptable .

In summary...

• The zero-width-non-joiner, which Word calls no-width optional break can be used to allow Word to break a long string at a controlled position. You can enter it from the numeric keypad as alt-8204 or from the Special Characters dialogue box
• The zero-width-joiner, which Word calls no-width non break is used to force Word to concatenate strings where it would normally insert a line break. You can enter it from the numeric keypad as alt-8205 or from the Special Characters dialogue box.
• As well as breaking the displayed URL with Word's no-width optional break, you should create a clickable hyperlink using ctrl-K.

In fact, the behaviour of no-width optional break and no-width non-break is subtler than that described above, as they both allow for ligatures between characters. The most basic soft-space character is the zero-width space. Word does not provide that in its Special Characters dialogue box – which is why I did not mention it above – but you can enter it at the keyboard. It is included in the table below, for completeness.