Spacing

Review the reST documentation on line blocks (a.k.a “how to get single-spaced lines of text”); the need to do this will probably be the commonest “special case” exception to ordinary spacing that will be needed when working on ICG docs.

ICG Usage

• an alternative to line blocks (see above), |br| will introduce a single line break where used
• |sp| will add one non-breaking space where inserted

There is literally no mechanism in reST for adding horizontal white space in a doc. Though it is strongly recommended that white-space-controlling efforts be avoided at all times, inevitably there are exceptional cases where obtaining forced white space is necessary, and without a method for doing the forcing, inordinate and inelegant contortions are required, thus |br| and |sp| are needed.

Itasca Consulting Group, Inc.
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 310
Minneapolis, MN 55418
   phone: 612 371-4717
   fax: 612 371-4711

| Itasca Consulting Group, Inc.
| 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 310
| Minneapolis, MN 55418
|   phone: 612 371-4717
|   fax: 612 371-4711

Itasca Consulting Group, Inc. |br|
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 310 |br|
Minneapolis, MN 55418 |br|
|sp| |sp| phone: 612 371-4717 |br|
|sp| |sp| fax: 612 371-4711

Itasca Consulting Group, Inc. 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 310 Minneapolis, MN 55418

phone: 612 371-4717 fax: 612 371-4711

Itasca Consulting Group, Inc.

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 310

Minneapolis, MN 55418

phone: 612 371-4717

fax: 612 371-4711

Itasca Consulting Group, Inc.
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 310
Minneapolis, MN 55418
    phone: 612 371-4717
    fax: 612 371-4711

(See what is happening in the sidenote in the ICG: Notes topic for a valid “real world” illustration of a case where forced line breaks are desirable.)

Though rare, there will be contexts where eliminating the breaking space elements within a string is needed to “fool” line wrapping. This can be done with the combination of |sp| and \ (the \ is eliminating the typed space character that follows it).

Sometimes you have text (string(s)) that you'd like to keep together: "To\
|sp|\ be,\ |sp|\ or\ |sp|\ not\ |sp|\ to\ |sp|\ be."  View source to see
what happened here (also, you may need to widen/narrow your window to see
the effect).

Sometimes you have text (string(s)) that you’d like to keep together: “To be, or not to be.” View source to see what happened here (also, you may need to widen/narrow your window to see the effect).

In paragraphs this kind of thing probably will be very rare. In the silly case above, simply using |br| would achieve the purpose (however, the non-breaking space approach is assured to look better across all possible screen widths). The need to eliminate breaking characters in strings pops up a little more frequently in tables, where narrower column widths will cause breaks in entries that are unwanted.

Note

It is true, there is a Unicode non-breaking character (U+00A0) that can be put into .rst files instead of using |sp|. This would be a preferable approach were it not for the fact that those characters are effectively imperceptible when looking at a source document. There are two right in here (  ). Open the .rst for this document and see if you can tell.