EndNote appears to support non-breaking spaces in most fields (eg title, date) (eg 27^April^2017) and have them insert correctly in Word.
The trouble is that strings that are controlled by the Output Style don’t allow for non-breaking characters. We really need these to avoid line-breaks in the bibliography.
Manually editing in Word is time-consuming and stressful when up against a submission deadline. The point of EndNote is that you edit the reference once in the software and never again so that you don’t have to stress over whether the page number range has gotten separated from its “pp.”.
EndNote should support:
- non-breaking page range with non-breaking en-dash: eg pp.^235–247
- non-breaking spaces in Volume and Issue: eg vol.^34, no.^3
- non-breaking spaces in Author name plus initial: eg Smith,^PJ & Watson,^TL
- non-breaking spaces in Editor intials plus name: eg PJ^Smith & TL^Watson (eds)
- non-breaking hyphens
- non-breaking dates as default (ie without the need to manually insert non-breaking spaces): eg 27^April^2017
Part of the problem appears to be that EndNote citation templates use the non-breaking space character to indicate the function “link to adjacent” to string fields together, and there appears to be no way to edit what happens between the field prefix and the data, ie between “vol.” and the volume number (see screenshot). The “link to adjacent” character seems to default to a regular space with no way to change this.
Perhaps the clever engineers could add an option to the fields to make the field non-breaking, or in the case of names, add the option to keep initials with last name.
Or perhaps change the “link to adjacent” character to something very obscure rather than a non-breaking space character so that non-breaking spaces can recover their proper function.
Thank you.
