Add guidance on nonbreaking spaces

[julian-cable]

Document in the style guide the situations where two words in a product name must be kept on the same line.

The Word Nerds meeting on 7 December agreed with David's proposal, to stipulate (only) the following scenarios:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
(or similarly for any trailing version number)

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Also, product names must never be broken across lines and hyphenated, such as:
Open
-Shift

[daobrien]

That wasn't my proposal. Where did you get that?

My proposal was only for "Red Hat" to use a   (already in place), and also before the version number (also already in place). Everything else was a bit hand-wavy and nobody was really sure:

Enterprise Linux or not?
Automation Platform or not?
OpenShift Container Platform or not?

I don't think I've ever seen a product name hyphenated, but I guess it's a good idea to actually say that. We don't use the hyphenation engine; if a word doesn't fit on a line it's pushed to the next line. Other groups or departments (esp. outside Red Hat) might have different approaches, however, so stating this explicitly is probably good.

[julian-cable]

@daobrien I got it from the discussion between you and Bascha Harris in the Word Nerds chat room from 10 November. Those were the items listed under your "Can we use this?" comment.

[daobrien]

ok, that was a proposal, yes, but this is a case of "You need to read the fine print" (don't you hate that?).

In the same thread you'll find the following:
"I feel like we got to a place where we only really paid attention to this for "Red Hat" and let other things break naturally. ALTHOUGH David pointed out that we may want to reconsider that for version numbers as we don't want them to break away from the rest of the product name. That makes sense to me, and I could see recommending adding that guidance to the entry on "version numbers."

[julian-cable]

Is there a compelling reason for not using a nonbreaking space between "Enterprise Linux", for example? This is what writers have been doing (and I have been enforcing) on our latest projects in the practice. It seems to me that, provided that we give clear guidance on the usage, the writers will follow it.

[bonnevil]

The more nonbreaking spaces you force in Red{nbsp}Hat Enterprise{nbsp}Linux{nbsp}7, for example, the more weird line breaks that you're going to have. So if we don't need the nbsp in Enterprise Linux, I'm fine with that.

[daobrien]

The more nonbreaking spaces you force in Red{nbsp}Hat Enterprise{nbsp}Linux{nbsp}7, for example, the more weird line breaks that you're going to have. So if we don't need the nbsp in Enterprise Linux, I'm fine with that.

Totally agree with that, plus:

• Brand/Marketing haven't been able to give us clear guidelines to work with, which is why this bug was raised to begin with.
• The simpler the rules the better.
• The more scalable the rules the better. How do you apply a rule for Red{nbsp}Hat Enterprise{nbsp}Linux{nbsp}7 to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.0 and so on? Our product names are getting more complex, so the simpler the rules the better IMO.

[julian-cable]

OK, I propose then to specify in the style guide to include a nonbreaking space between "Red Hat" and between "[last-word-of-product-name]" and a version number. If existing content has other nonbreaking spaces elsewhere in a product name, I would not seek to edit them out.

[daobrien]

OK, I propose then to specify in the style guide to include a nonbreaking space between "Red Hat" and between "[last-word-of-product-name]" and a version number.

Right, that's the point we're trying to get to. More than that is either unnecessary or perhaps even wrong if it causes strange line-break behaviour (e.g., if you have a very long prod name and the author uses non-breaking spaces everywhere, which I have actually seen).

If existing content has other nonbreaking spaces elsewhere in a product name, I would not seek to edit them out.

Yes, this is another of those "if it ain't broke don't fix it" scenarios, but again, if it causes strange line breaks then we should fix it.

Should we consider creating a subsection that deals with this type of thing (prod names aren't the only things that use  ) and provide some examples of each? I'm trying (and failing right now) to think of what else might fall into this category. Something like:
Using Special Characters
Description of what a special character is.

Nonbreaking Spaces

• example
• example

Zero-width Spaces
Not sure if we still use these.

• example

You get the idea.

[julian-cable]

Proposed update to section 3.7:

Use a nonbreaking space in the following situations to avoid a break across lines:

• In the company name, between "Red" and "Hat".
• In a product name, between the last word and a version number.

Examples (for AsciiDoc):

• Red{nbsp}Hat Enterprise Linux{nbsp}8
• Red{nbsp}Hat OpenShift Container Platform{nbsp}4.9

Nonbreaking spaces are not needed elsewhere in a product name and might cause undesirable line-breaking behavior.

[julian-cable]

@daobrien @nmuller66 @sffrench For information and any feedback.

[sffrench]

Seems like you have it covered, LGTM Julian.

[julian-cable]

I forgot to cover one aspect. My suggested additional wording:

Do not hyphenate or break a product name across lines, as in the following incorrect example:

Open
-Shift