At 22:12 10/12/2020 +0100, Martin Groenescheij wrote:
The definition from PC Magazine
What is the difference between a hard and soft return in Word?
*Hard return*: Pressing the *Enter* key in
*Word* ends a paragraph. It's officially known
as typing a *hard return*. ... The *soft
return*, or *line break*, is used primarily in
titles and headings; when you have a long title
and need to split it up *between* two lines, you
press Shift+*Enter* to insert the *soft return*.
It would be interesting to know as well what
point you are wishing to make - apart, perhaps,
from merely advertising your copy-and-paste skills!
The key word in your quotation is "Word": this
definition of "soft return" is the language
apparently used by Microsoft in describing the
behaviour of Microsoft Word. As you will realise,
I was attempting instead to assist a user of
OpenOffice. If you do a little more research, you
will indeed find many references to Microsoft's
(mis-?)usage, but find most other references disagreeing:
Computer Hope says:
A
soft return
is a carriage return
automatically inserted by the software program usually because of a word wrap.
Webopedia says
soft returns are inserted automatically by the
word processor as part of its word wrap capability.
and PCMag, Your Dictionary, The Computer Language
Company Inc., and McGraw-Hill Dictionary of
Scientific & Technical Terms all say (more or less):
A control code that is automatically entered into
a text document by the word-processing program to
mark the end of a line, based on the current right margin.
(There are also some references that don't
mention Word, but I suspect they are in the "Oh,
but everyone uses Microsoft Word, don't they?" camp.)
These definitions refer to the natural wrapping
of text in a word processor document from line to
line, and have nothing to do with manually
inserted line breaks, of course. In any case,
Microsoft's usage makes no sense: there is no
sense in which a line break is in any way "soft".
Just like paragraph breaks, line breaks are
hard-coded into any text document and do not move
around nor disappear and reappear - as the word
"soft" might suggest. Microsoft (if it was them)
and their followers have hijacked a useful term inappropriately.
The original questioner's problem occurred
because she was looking at the appearance of her
document and failing to be being aware of its
structure - in particular of the significance of
paragraph breaks in separating parts with
different paragraph styles. Talking of "hard
returns" and "soft returns" does not clarify
where paragraphs begin and end. Surely it is more
helpful to use self-explanatory language? Why
should anyone recommend OpenOffice users to use
unhelpful terms apparently promulgated by Microsoft?
Brian Barker
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