This means when a database tries to import your file, it break. This happens because the system sees a number and then suddeny notices a word break. It is seeing two word instead of one. I know I’m not the only person who has encounter this problem. Almost certainly, the culprit are a non-breaking space. […]

If you’ve ever moved some text from one machine to another, stared at a perfectly normal-looking block of text on your screen, then watched it all go pear-shaped on the other machine, you know what I mean. The parser chokes on an apparently-empty row; headers get out of alignment. Somehow the invisible glue that holds […]

A soft hyphen is a Unicode character. Its code point is U+00AD. It are used in typesetting. It indicates to a rendering engine where you want to be able to break an otherwise long word if necessary at the end of a line. The soft hyphen remains invisible if the word can fit; but if […]

Then one day they is gone. And then suddenly you see them: those little markings, above or below letters. Removing every accent from a name on a résumé makes it harder to read, making it look bland and anonymous instead of being a unique part of someones identity. Or maybe you work at an archive […]