Word space at end of line

You can often improve the look of your document by keeping certain words and paragraphs together on the page or across page breaks. Also, you can use hyphenation to improve overall readability.

Word automatically breaks the text at a space or a hyphen at the end of a line. To keep two words or a hyphenated word together on one line, you can use a nonbreaking space or nonbreaking hyphen instead of a regular space or hyphen.

1. Click where you want to insert the nonbreaking space.

2. On the Insert tab, in the Symbols group, click Symbol.

   

3. In the box that opens, click More Symbols.

   

4. In the Symbol dialog box, on the Special Characters tab, click the Nonbreaking Space row to highlight it, and then click Insert.

   

5. Click Close.

   Tip: You can also use the keyboard shortcut. Click where you want to insert the nonbreaking space, and press Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar.

Sometimes you want a hyphenated word to stay together on one line, without it breaking across lines.

1. Click where you want to insert the nonbreaking hyphen.

2. On the Insert tab, in the Symbols group, click Symbol.

   

3. In the box that opens, click More Symbols.

   

4. In the Symbol dialog box, on the Special Characters tab, click the Nonbreaking Hyphen row to highlight it, and then click Insert.

   

5. Click Close.

   Tip: You can also use the keyboard shortcut. Click where you want to insert the nonbreaking hyphen, and press Ctrl+Shift+Minus Sign.

Word automatically breaks paragraphs at the end of a page, so a paragraph that started on one page continues on to the next page. To keep the whole paragraph on the same page, follow these steps.

1. Right-click the paragraph that you want to keep together. In the box that opens, select Paragraph.

   

2. In the Paragraph dialog box, click the Line and Page Breaks tab.

3. In the Pagination section, select the Keep lines together check box, and click OK.

If two consecutive paragraphs or a subhead and a paragraph are closely related, you might want to keep them on the same page.

1. Right-click the paragraph or subhead that you want to keep with the content that follows it. In the box that opens, select Paragraph.

   

2. In the Paragraph dialog box, click the Line and Page Breaks tab.

3. In the Pagination section, select the Keep with next check box, and click OK.

   Tip: It’s best not to add additional line breaks between your paragraphs because Word interprets each line break as a beginning of a new paragraph, and page breaks might not occur properly. If you want spaces between paragraphs, use the Paragraph Spacing controls. For more information, see Change spacing between paragraphs.

If a paragraph has a page break in the middle so that only the last line appears at the top of the following page, this lonely line is called a “widow.” If, on the other hand, a paragraph has a page break in the middle so that only the first line appears at the bottom of a page while the rest of the paragraph appears on the next page, this lonely line is called an “orphan.”

If you want to avoid widow and orphan lines in your document, follow these steps.

1. Right-click the paragraph in which you want to avoid widows and orphans. In the box that opens, select Paragraph.

2. Click the Line and page breaks tab.

3. In the Pagination section, select the Widow/Orphan control check box.

4. Click OK.

If a word is too long to fit at the end of a line, Microsoft Office Word 2007 moves the word to the beginning of the next line instead of hyphenating it. However, you can use the Hyphenation feature to automatically or manually hyphenate the text, insert optional or nonbreaking hyphens, and set the maximum amount of space allowed between a word and the right margin without hyphenating the word.

With automatic hyphenation, Office Word 2007 automatically inserts hyphens where they are needed. If you edit the document later and change line breaks, Office Word 2007 will re-hyphenate the document.

1. Make sure that no text is selected.

2. On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Hyphenation, and then click Automatic.

   

An optional hyphen is a hyphen that is used to control where a word or phrase breaks if it falls at the end of a line. For example, you can specify that the word «nonprinting» breaks as «non-printing» instead of «nonprint-ing.» When you insert an optional hyphen in a word that is not at the end of a line, the hyphen will be visible only if you turn on Show/Hide.

1. On the Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click Show/Hide.

   

2. Click in the word where you want to insert the optional hyphen.

3. Press CTRL+HYPHEN.

To automatically hyphenate part of a document, do the following:

1. Select the text that you want to hyphenate.

2. On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Hyphenation, and then click Automatic.

   

When you manually hyphenate text, Office Word 2007 searches for text to hyphenate. After you indicate where you want to hyphenate the text, Word inserts an optional hyphen. If you later edit the document and change line breaks, Office Word 2007 displays and prints only the optional hyphens that still fall at the end of lines. Word doesn’t re-hyphenate the document.

1. Select the text you want to hyphenate.

2. On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Hyphenation, and then click Manual.

3. If Office Word identifies a word or phrase to hyphenate, do one of the following:

   • To insert an optional hyphen in the location that Office Word proposes, click Yes.

   • To insert an optional hyphen in another part of the word, move the insertion point to that location, and then click Yes.

Nonbreaking hyphens prevent hyphenated words, numbers, or phrases from breaking if they fall at the end of a line of text. For example, you can prevent 555-0123 from breaking; instead, the entire item will move to the beginning of the next line.

1. Click where you want to insert a nonbreaking hyphen.

2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+HYPHEN.

The hyphenation zone is the maximum amount of space Office Word 2007 allows between a word and the right margin without hyphenating the word. You can change the hyphenation zone to make it wider or narrower. To reduce the number of hyphens, make the hyphenation zone wide. To reduce the raggedness of the right margin, make the hyphenation zone narrower.

1. On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Hyphenation, and then click Hyphenation Options.

2. In the Hyphenation zone, type the amount of space you want.

You can remove all automatic hyphenation and each instance of manual hyphenation, such as optional and nonbreaking hyphens.

• To remove automatic hyphenation, on the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Hyphenation, and then click None.

1. To remove manual hyphenation, on the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Replace.

2. If you don’t see the Special button, click More.

3. Click Special, and then click either Optional Hyphen to remove manual hyphens, or Nonbreaking Hyphen to remove nonbreaking hyphens.

4. Leave the Replace box empty.

5. Click Fix Next, Replace, or Replace All.

See Also

Line and page breaks

Insert a page break

Change spacing between paragraphs

Stop Words from Breaking Across Lines or Pages in Microsoft Word

by Avantix Learning Team | Updated March 14, 2021

Applies to: Microsoft^® Word^® 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and 365 (Windows)

There are many ways to stop words from splitting across lines in Microsoft Word. If Word is inserting hyphens in a word you don’t want to break across lines, you can turn off automatic hyphenation for the paragraph. You can also keep words or characters (numbers or letters) together in Microsoft Word using nonbreaking spaces or nonbreaking hyphens.

To view nonbreaking spaces, nonbreaking hyphens and paragraph marks:

1. Click the Home tab in the Ribbon.
2. Click the Show/Hide ¶ in the Paragraph group.

You can turn off the symbols by clicking on the same button.

Recommended article: 14 Timesaving Microsoft Word Selection Shortcuts to Quickly Select Text

Do you want to learn more about Microsoft Word? Check out our virtual classroom or live classroom Word courses >

Turning off automatic hyphenation

In Microsoft Word, automatic hyphenation is turned on by default for normal paragraphs (using the Normal style) so Word may insert hyphens and break words across lines.

To stop words from splitting across lines in a paragraph or paragraphs by turning off automatic hyphenation:

1. Select the paragraph or paragraphs.
2. Click the Home tab in the Ribbon.
3. Click the dialog box launcher on the bottom right corner of the Paragraph group. The Paragraph dialog box appears.
4. Click Line and Page Breaks.
5. Select or check Don’t Hyphenate.
6. Click OK.

Below is the Paragraph dialog box with the option to turn off hyphenation:

You can also turn off automatic hyphenation for multiple paragraphs by editing the style for those paragraphs (for example, the Normal style).

Turning off automatic hyphenation for all new documents

If you prefer to turn off automatic hyphenation for new documents, you can change the default settings.

To turn off automatic hyphenation for new documents based on the default Normal template:

1. Create a new blank document (this should be based on the Normal template)..
2. Click the Home tab in the Ribbon.
3. Click the dialog box launcher on the bottom right corner of the Paragraph group. The Paragraph dialog box appears.
4. Click Line and Page Breaks.
5. Select or check Don’t Hyphenate.
6. Click Set As Default. A dialog box appears.
7. Select All documents based on the Normal.dotm template. Note that you can select the current document only.
8. Click OK twice.

Stop words from breaking across lines using nonbreaking spaces

If you want words or characters to stay together on the same line, you can use nonbreaking spaces instead of standard spaces.

For example, it is unlikely that you would want the following to break across lines or pages:

416 736 2288

3 M

To insert a nonbreaking space between two words or characters using a keyboard shortcut:

1. Position the cursor between the two words or characters you want to keep together (there should be no space between these characters).
2. Press Ctrl + Shift + Spacebar. Word inserts a nonbreaking space.

To insert a nonbreaking space between two words or letters using the Insert Symbol dialog box:

1. Position the cursor between the two words or characters you want to keep together (there should be no space between these characters).
2. Click the Insert tab in the Ribbon.
3. Click Insert Symbol and then More Symbols in the drop-down menu. A dialog box appears.
4. Select the Special Characters tab.
5. Select Nonbreaking space and click Insert.
6. Click Close. Word inserts a nonbreaking space.

The Insert Symbol dialog box has two tabs (a tab for Symbols and a tab for Special Characters):

Stop words from breaking across lines using nonbreaking hyphens or dashes

You can also use nonbreaking hyphens or dashes to keep words or characters together.

For example, it is unlikely that you would want the following to break across lines or pages:

co-ordinator

416-736-9943

To insert a nonbreaking hyphen between two words or characters using a keyboard shortcut:

1. Position the cursor between the two words or characters you want to keep together (there should be no space between these characters).
2. Press Ctrl + Shift + Underscore (_). Word inserts a nonbreaking hyphen.

To insert a nonbreaking hyphen between two words or characters using the Insert Symbol dialog box:

1. Position the cursor between the two words or characters you want to keep together (there should be no space between these characters).
2. Click the Insert tab in the Ribbon.
3. Click Insert Symbol and then More Symbols in the drop-down menu. A dialog box appears.
4. Select the Special Characters tab.
5. Select Nonbreaking hyphen and click Insert.
6. Click Close. Word inserts a nonbreaking hyphen.

It’s common to use nonbreaking spaces and hyphens to keep words or characters together in Microsoft Word and in documents in other programs.

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More resources

How to Insert an Em or En Dash in Microsoft Word

How to View Word Count in Microsoft Word (4 Ways)

How to Find and Replace in Word (and Use Wildcards)

How to Insert a Check Mark or Tick Mark in Word (5 Ways)

Microsoft Word Tricks to Keep Text Together (Paragraphs, Lines or Words)

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To show non-printable and white-space symbols in Microsoft Word, click the button button Show/Hide ¶ (or pressing Ctrl+* or Ctrl+Shift+8):

You will be able to see the following marks for white-space characters:

   1)   A little dot between words represents a normal space (also called word space):

   2)   A degree symbols between word represents a nonbreaking space (also called non-breaking space, no-break space, non-breakable space (NBSP), hard space, or fixed space) that prevents text wrapping at the end of the line. A Nonbreaking space in the Word document looks like:

A general rule of publishing is to use non-breaking spaces between words of
organization and person names, postal addresses, etc.

Some popular rules:

   3)   A little dot with varying gaps before and after the dot represents Em Space and En Space. These spaces have different widths on printing:

• Em space is a space with the width of the lowercase m character.
• En space is a space with the width of the lowercase n character.

   4)   A vertical bar between words represents a ¼ Em space (also known as mid-space) is a space with the ¼ width of the lowercase m character:

If you want to see only space marks and no other non-printable symbols, do the following:

   1.   On the File tab, click the Options button:

   2.   In the Word Options dialog box, on the Display tab, under Always show these formatting marks on the screen, check or uncheck the Spaces option:

See also this tip in French:
Types d’espaces spéciaux dans les documents Word.

Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Inserting a Non-Breaking Space.

When Word calculates line width and wraps text to the next line, it tries to break the line at either a space or a hyphen. Sometimes, however, you may not want Word to break a line at a certain space. For instance, you may want to make sure that two adjacent words appear on the same line as each other.

The answer is to use non-breaking spaces instead of regular spaces when you don’t want Word to break a line at a certain space. To do this, hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys as you press the Spacebar. Word will then not break the line at that point.

An alternative way of inserting a non-breaking space is to follow these steps:

1. Display the Insert tab of the ribbon.
2. 2 At the very right side of the ribbon, in the Symbols group, click Symbol and then More Symbols. Word displays the Symbol dialog box.
3. Click on the Special Characters tab. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Special Characters tab of the Symbol dialog box.

4. Highlight the Nonbreaking Space character.
5. Click on Insert.
6. Close the dialog box by clicking on Cancel.

Author Bio

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen…

• Microsoft

• Software

[Edit] complete code added to bottom, with corrections to original snippets

Your desire then, as I understand it is to take an existing line of some length, and rewrite it to a new line of the same length as the original, but filling in spaces as evenly distributed as possible, with no space after the last word: For example:

«This is my original sentence » (four spaces at end — string length is 32)

|T|h|i|s| |i|s| |m|y| |o|r|i|g|i|n|a|l| |s|e|n|t|e|n|c|e| | | | |

You would like to redistribute the spaces such that the original length, 32, is preserved:

|T|h|i|s| | |i|s| | |m|y| | |o|r|i|g|i|n|a|l| | |s|e|n|t|e|n|c|e|.

The following should provide a set of steps you can implement in your code to distribute your words evenly across a line maintaining its original length.

First, store original line length:

int origLen = strlen(line);

Parse the string a first time using strtok() with space, " " as the delimiter, for the purpose of collecting the following:

1) the number of words
2) the cumulative length of all the words:

char *buf;
char temp[80];    
char lineKeep[80];
int accumLen=0;
int wordCount=0;
int numSpaces;

strcpy(lineKeep, line);

buf = strtok(lineKeep, " ");
while(buf)
{
    strcpy(temp, buf);
    accumLen += strlen(temp)+1;//+1 because each word includes one following space
    wordCount++;
    buf = strtok(NULL, " ");
}
accumLen--; //remove last space

Now you can repeat the parse, but this time you have the information you need to re-construct the string as it is parsed:

numSpaces = (origLen - accumLen)+1;//determine number of trailing spaces after last word
                                   //+1 to compensate for space at end of last word.

//parse line, place words and extra spaces  
int spcToAdd;  //number spaces added to every word except last
int extraSpc;  //remainder spaces to distribute  

spcToAdd = numSpaces/(wordCount - 1);
extraSpc = numSpaces%(wordCount - 1);

memset(lineKeep, 0, 80);

buf = strtok(line, " ");
while(buf)
{
    strcat(lineKeep, buf);
    for(i=0;i<spcToAdd;i++) strcat(lineKeep, " ");
    if(extraSpc > 0) strcat(lineKeep, " "), extraSpc--;
    buf = strtok(NULL, " ");
}

That should do it.

[EDIT]
Complete code, with corrections to original snippets:

#include <ansi_c.h>
int main(void)
{
    char line[]="this is my original line      ";
    char *buf;
    char temp[80];    
    char lineKeep[80];
    int accumLen=0;
    int wordCount=0, count;
    int numSpaces;
    int i;
    int origLen = strlen(line);

    strcpy(lineKeep, line);
    printf("Original with "*" to demark spaces :*%s*n", lineKeep);
    buf = strtok(lineKeep, " ");
    while(buf)
    {
        strcpy(temp, buf);
        accumLen += strlen(temp)+1;//+1 because each word includes one following space
        wordCount++;
        buf = strtok(NULL, " ");
    }
    accumLen--; //remove last space

    //second part
    numSpaces = (origLen - accumLen);//determine number of trailing spaces after last word
                                       //+1 to compensate for space at end of last word.
    //parse line, place words and extra spaces  
    int spcToAdd;  //number spaces added to every word except last
    int extraSpc;  //remainder spaces to distribute  

    spcToAdd = numSpaces/(wordCount - 1); //Add one extra space
    extraSpc = numSpaces%(wordCount - 1); //while they last add additional space

    memset(lineKeep, 0, 80);

    count = 0;
    buf = strtok(line, " ");
    while(buf)
    {
        count++;
        strcat(lineKeep, buf);
        if(count < wordCount)
        {
            strcat(lineKeep, " "); //normally occuring space
            for(i=0;i<spcToAdd;i++) strcat(lineKeep, " ");
            if(extraSpc > 0) strcat(lineKeep, " "), extraSpc--;
        }
        buf = strtok(NULL, " ");
    }
    lineKeep[strlen(lineKeep)]=0;
    printf("modified with "*" to demark spaces :*%s*n", lineKeep);
    getchar();
    return 0;
}

Image of results from this code:

[EDIT] OP original code with comments, and some edits (not fully debugged)

int add_space(char *line, int remain, int word_count)
{
    int line_width;  //added

    if (remain == 0.0)
        return 0; // Don't need to operate.

    line_width = strlen(line);

    int ret;
    char arr[word_count][line_width]; //line width not originally defined, 
    memset(arr, 0, word_count * line_width * sizeof(char));

    char *blank = calloc(line_width, sizeof(char));
    if (blank == NULL)
    {
        fprintf(stderr, "calloc for arr error!n");
        return -1;
    }

    for (int i = 0; i < word_count; i++)
    {
        ret = sscanf(line, "%s", arr[i]); // gdb shows somehow it won't read in.
        if (ret != 1)                     // each time this loops around, "this" is placed into arr[i];
        {                                 // "line" is not changing, strtok will traverse line
            fprintf(stderr, "Error occured!n");
            return -1;
        }
        //arr[i] = strcat(arr[i], " ");      // won't compile.
        strcpy(arr[i],strcat(arr[i], " ")); // assignment of char array to char array uses strcpy, or sprintf, et. al.
        //each loop now adds " " -> "this " 
                                            // Note: you can assign char to char using =, but not char arrays
    }
    size_t spaces = remain / (word_count * 1.0); //size_t == uint, mult by float is set back into uint.
    memset(blank, ' ', spaces + 1);
    for (int i = 0; i < word_count - 1; i++)
    {
        //arr[0] = strcat(arr[i], blank);     // won't compile.
        strcpy(arr[i],strcat(arr[i], blank)); // Same as above. and index of arr[] should be i
    }

    memset(blank, ' ', spaces);
    //arr[word_count-1] = strcat(arr[word_count-1], blank); //same
    strcpy(arr[word_count-1],strcat(arr[word_count-1], blank));  //at this point, each arr[i] 
                                                                 //contains "test   " (3 spaces and NULL)
    for (int i = 1; i < word_count; i++)
    {
        //arr[0] = strcat(arr[0], arr[i]); //same
        strcpy(arr[0], strcat(arr[0], arr[i])); 
    } //at this point arr[0] contains "test   test   test   test   t"
      //ran out of room, note there is no NULL terminator '' at end.
    free(blank);
    return 0;
}