What are the blue-green buckets I see in the Text Editor?

Sometimes, you might notice blue-green buckets in Vellum’s Text Editor. In this example, one such bucket appears between “lazy” and “dog”:

These characters are called non-breaking spaces. A non-breaking space is typically used to keep two words together on the same line. However, they can sneak into your book upon import, or when you copy and paste into Vellum.

Because they can affect your book’s layout, if you discover unexpected non-breaking spaces, we recommend removing them.

Removing non-breaking spaces

While you can simply delete a non-breaking space and insert a regular one, if you have a lot of them, you may prefer to use Find and Replace.

To do this, copy and paste a single non-breaking space into the Find field. It will appear in a light blue lozenge:

Then, you can insert a regular space into the Replace field and press the Replace All button.