When I include a URL — or another long continuous chunks of text — in a footnote in Microsoft Word, the preceding line often ends up having lots of white space. The usual fix for that is to include an optional hyphen, but I don't want the URL to be hyphenated; I want it to break at a slash or a dot. At times, I've entered manual line breaks, but that's not optimal, because I don't want it to break at a fixed place; I want it to break at the place that yields the least internal white space, and that might change as the earlier lines in the footnote change, or as the article gets reformatted.
I've just stumbled on what seems like a good solution: Insert / Symbol / Special Characters / No-Width Optional Break. You can insert this special character wherever you're willing to see the long continuous chunk be broken; it's still not automatic, but it's better than the alternatives I've noticed (at least the alternatives that let me stick with Word). And if you find yourself doing this often, you can easily assign a shortcut key to this special symbol.
Oddly, Word's Help feature doesn't seem to discuss this; I had tried earlier to search for optional line break, but couldn't find anything useful. So I thought I'd pass this along for the benefit of others who might be facing the same problem I had faced in the past.
UPDATE: Commenter Tim_K points out the downside: "The solution works in terms of improving the appearance of the Word document, but when I tried it, add the special character made it so the URL no longer acted as a link to take you to the website in question. I guess you can get around this by copying and pasting the URL into you web browser, but it's far from an ideal solution. What's wanted is to improve the appearance of the Word document and have the URL function as a link." I don't find this to be much of a problem since most of my links aren't likely to be the sort of things that the typical reader will want to follow. But it may well be a downside for others; and it sure would be great if Microsoft kept this from happening, as they could easily do.
FURTHER UPDATE: Commenter Steven Joyce suggests a fix to Tim_K's problem: "Highlight the full URL (both halves), right-click and select 'Edit Hyperlink' or 'Hyperlink', and then put the correct URL (without the special character) in the 'Address' box."
"Word Hacks" by Andrew Savikas has more information on writing such a script. Here's a link to it on Google Books.
One problem with the tinyurl link is that it doesn't allow the hardcopy reader to see the source w/o starting up a computer. Its nice for the reader to see that you are at a reputable source for whatever you are citing (e.g., at www.va.gov for a Veterans Administration report).
Says the "Dog"
One big caveat: If you export your document to a PDF and someone tries to copy it you might wind up with spurious characters in the URL. Most users won't realize why the link fails.
Personally, I'd set up a website with links to referenced material. Then if the link moves you can redirect it or use an archiving service.
In fact, the first thing I do when I paste a URL into a document is right-click and strip out the hyperlink so the feature of Word that allows clickable links to open in the default browser isn't constantly bugging me.
The link above is very useful for questions regarding the programs within Microsoft Office. The responses are timely and helpful.
There are several solutions to this.
1. Download and install Startup Control Panel by Mike Lin. Its free.
2. Run Startup Control Panel and find the line where adobe is loading stuff and uncheck the box next to it.
Another program that I also use, but might make non-techie types a bit more confused because it includes even more configuration stuff than Startup Control Panel is Sysinternals Autoruns program
Sysinternals was bought out by Microsoft around the middle of last year. Their very cool utilities are still available for free, but from Microsoft now. The link above for Autoruns takes you to the right page for all the free Sysinternals utilities.
Finally, Houston lawyer you can really fix the problem by dowloading and installing the free PDF reader program called Foxit Reader This program is smaller and much faster to open than the very bloated and open for various trojan and virus attack laden Adobe Acrobat. When you install it make sure you select to have foxit be your default reader for PDF files. Or if you have to manually make foxit reader your default reader for PDF files. Then you can happily ignore Adobe's bloatware or even unistall it if you wish. I keep Adobe around but its appropriately neutered with no startup applets allowed to run and with foxit as my default PDF reader.
All of the above are must have programs for the techie inspired lawyer, imho.
And then there's the free Primo PDF for PDF creation and the free PDF Tools for joining, splitting, locking, and unlocking PDF files.
Says the "Dog"
Note also that even if the text has a ragged right margin, a break-less URL will make the preceding line have lots of white space, just at the end rather than the middle. Still likely to be a little ugly, it seems to me.