Non-printing character in word processors

Non-printing characters or formatting marks are characters for content designing in word processors, which are not displayed at printing. It is also possible to customize their display on the monitor. The most common non-printable characters in word processors are pilcrow, space, non-breaking space, tab character etc.^[1][2]

Characters

To display characters on the monitor screen in Microsoft Word (Home tab) or OpenOffice.org and its derivatives (upper panel), press the icon ¶.^[3] The following symbols will be displayed:^{[citation needed]}

• Space (·) each pressing of the space key will be displayed like this.
• Non-breaking space (°) is a space character that prevents an automatic line break at its position.
• Pilcrow (¶) is the symbolic representation of paragraphs.
• Line break (↵) breaks the current line without new paragraph. It puts lines of text close together.
• Tab character (→) is used to align text horizontally to the next tab stop.
• End-of-cell and end-of row markers (¤) appear automatically in each box when display of non-printable characters turned on.
• Soft hyphen or non-breaking hyphen (-) is a hidden separator for hyphenation in the places specified by the user, regardless of the automatic hyphenation.^[4]
• ············Page Break············, ::::::::::Section Break::::::::::, or ············Column Break············

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Key combinations

Name	Common view	Common key combinationsfor Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org (from 3.0)	Key combination in other word processors	Windows Alt Key Codes[5]	Unicode name	Unicode code (HEX)	Unicode code (DEC)
Space	·	Space			SPACE	0x20	0032
Non-breaking space	°	Ctrl+⇧ Shift+Space	Ctrl+Space for FrameMaker, LyX (non-Mac), OpenOffice.org (before 3.0), WordPerfect	Alt+0+1+6+0 or Alt+2+5+5 (not always works)	NO-BREAK SPACE	00A0	0160
Pilcrow	¶	↵ Enter		Alt+0182 or Alt+20 (on number keyboard).
Line break	↵	⇧ Shift+↵ Enter
Tab character	→	Tab ↹
Soft hyphen	¬	Ctrl+-					2011
Page break	···Page Break···	Ctrl+↵ Enter

See also

• Control characters