Line breaking, also known as word wrapping, is breaking a section of text into lines so that it will fit into the available width of a page, window or other display area. In text display, line wrap is continuing on a new line when a line is full, so that each line fits into the viewable window, allowing text to be read from top to bottom without any horizontal scrolling. Word wrap is the additional feature of most text editors, word processors, and web browsers, of breaking lines between words rather than within words, where possible. Word wrap makes it unnecessary to hard-code newline delimiters within paragraphs, and allows the display of text to adapt flexibly and dynamically to displays of varying sizes.
Soft and hard returns
A soft return or soft wrap is the break resulting from line wrap or word wrap (whether automatic or manual), whereas a hard return or hard wrap is an intentional break, creating a new paragraph. With a hard return, paragraph-break formatting can (and should) be applied (either indenting or vertical whitespace). Soft wrapping allows line lengths to adjust automatically with adjustments to the width of the user's window or margin settings, and is a standard feature of all modern text editors, word processors, and email clients. Manual soft breaks are unnecessary when word wrap is done automatically, so hitting the "Enter" key usually produces a hard return.
Alternatively, "soft return" can mean an intentional, stored line break that is not a paragraph break. For example, it is common to print postal addresses in a multiple-line format, but the several lines are understood to be a single paragraph. Line breaks are needed to divide the words of the address into lines of the appropriate length.
In the contemporary graphical word processors Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org, users are expected to type a carriage return () between each paragraph. Formatting settings, such as first-line indentation or spacing between paragraphs, take effect where the carriage return marks the break. A non-paragraph line break, which is a soft return, is inserted using or via the menus, and is provided for cases when the text should start on a new line but none of the other side effects of starting a new paragraph are desired.
In text-oriented markup languages, a soft return is typically offered as a markup tag. For example, in HTML there is a <br> tag that has the same purpose as the soft return in word processors described above.
Unicode
The Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm determines a set of positions, known as break opportunities, that are appropriate places in which to begin a new line. The actual line break positions are picked from among the break opportunities by the higher level software that calls the algorithm, not by the algorithm itself, because only the higher level software knows about the width of the display the text is displayed on and the width of the glyphs that make up the displayed text.
The Unicode character set provides a line separator character as well as a paragraph separator to represent the semantics of the soft return and hard return.
0x2028 LINE SEPARATOR
* may be used to represent this semantic unambiguously
0x2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR
* may be used to represent this semantic unambiguously
Word boundaries, hyphenation, and hard spaces
The soft returns are usually placed after the ends of complete words, or after the punctuation that follows complete words. However, word wrap may also occur following a hyphen inside of a word. This is sometimes not desired, and can be blocked by using a non-breaking hyphen, or hard hyphen, instead of a regular hyphen.
A word without hyphens can be made wrappable by having soft hyphens in it. When the word isn't wrapped (i.e., isn't broken across lines), the soft hyphen isn't visible. But if the word is wrapped across lines, this is done at the soft hyphen, at which point it is shown as a visible hyphen on the top line where the word is broken. (In the rare case of a word that is meant to be wrappable by breaking it across lines but without making a hyphen ever appear, a zero-width space is put at the permitted breaking point(s) in the word.)
Sometimes word wrap is undesirable between adjacent words. In such cases, word wrap can usually be blocked by using a hard space or non-breaking space between the words, instead of regular spaces.