Insert nonbreaking space and nonbreaking hyphen - rmarkdown to word document

Question

Is there a way to insert a nonbreaking space/hyphen when rendering a word document from rmarkdown? In MS Word, these two are special characters a user can insert with a key shortcut or manually. I'm wondering if this operation can be done from rmarkdown code, for example using officer/officedown packages?

Answer 1

You could add a non-breaking space using the UTF-8-symbol \u00a0 and a non-breaking hyphen (hope I got it right) using \u2014.

library(officer)

doc <- read_docx() |> 
  body_add_par(value = "Non-breaking\u00a0space") |> 
  body_add_par(value = "Non-breaking\u2014space")

print(doc, "foo.docx")

The option I used to figure out these codes was to create a docx with the special characters which I scraped using officer::docx_summary(). Here is a minimal reprex of this approach:

library(officer)

fn <- tempfile(fileext = ".docx")

doc <- read_docx() |> 
  body_add_par(value = "Hello\u00a0World") |> 
  body_add_par(value = "Hello\u2014World")

print(doc, fn)

x <- read_docx(fn)

x <- officer::docx_summary(x)

stringi::stri_escape_unicode(x$text)
#> [1] "Hello\\u00a0World" "Hello\\u2014World"

Answer 2

I found the answer, thanks to this post How to insert non breaking space in word xml using java

Non-breaking space and non-breaking hyphens have their own unicode encodings. In my rmarkdown code I can use

    ABC`r knitr::asis_output("\U00A0")`DEF # sapce
    ABC`r knitr::asis_output("\U2011")`DEF # hyphen