Peter Bissmire

17-06-10

<Enter> is not the key to formatting heaven

It is a widespread belief that the <Enter> key can legitimately be used to solve perceived formatting problems.
This is simply not true.
It is a long-standing convention in word-processing that this key inserts a paragraph break. The equivalent in HTML is the tag pair </p><p>. To insert a line break, the combination <Shift>+<Enter> should be used (<br> in html, <br/> in xhtml).
To add to the confusion, the convention has grown up of calling these hard and soft breaks respectively, thus ensuring that their conventional names disguise their true functions.

The first example in the box shows the result of inserting a mid-sentence paragraph break when the formatting is set up in the traditional manner for additional leading between paragraphs and an indented first line. This is clearly worse than undesirable. A paragraph should, by definition, be a set of complete sentences.

The second example shows the result of inserting a line break at the same point. This is clearly an improvement on the first, although it is still hard to imagine circumstances in which this is really useful in mid-sentence. The one case that might irritate some "perfectionists" is where text wrapping leaves an article or preposition "orphaned" at the end of a line. Most word-processing packages offer the special characters, "No-Width Optional Break", "Nonbreaking Space" and "No-Width Non Break", which are taylor-made for such situations.

In MS Powerpoint, the line break was not available until later versions. Users frequently resort to the paragraph break to prevent a text box from extending too far to the right as they type. There is no need for this. Just pull the right hand end of the text box back to where you want it with drag-and-drop. The text will wrap as required.

Such randomly inserted breaks are a particular problem when it comes to using translation software. This divides text into segments that are supposed to be grammatically complete, mostly whole sentences. The paragraph break is considered to be an inviolable separator between segments, so a mid-sentence break irrevocably splits the sentence in two.

Word order often differs from one language to another, as do word lengths. This means that, even if the break is appropriate, its appropriate position will almost certainly shift. In many cases, the break will disrupt the grammatical structure. An obvious example is provided by German participles, which normally go to the end of a clause or sentence. In English, they stay in the verbal position. Thus, when translating, the participle moves from one end of the grammatical unit to the other. If the grammatical unit is split between two segments, it becomes impossible to generate segments in the one language that correctly correspond to parallel segments in the other.

Parallel source language and target language segments are stored for future reference. The result of mid-sentence breaks is therefore nonsense in the translation memory database.

Next time you feel like hitting the <Enter> key, just hold back for a second and think twice!