Soft return

In word processing and text-oriented markup languages the term soft return can mean a line break due to word wrapping. Alternatively it can mean a stored line break that is not a paragraph break. For example, it is common to print postal addresses in a multiple-line format, but the several lines are understood to be a single paragraph. A soft return is contrasted with a hard return, which is usually a carriage return.

Word processors

In the contemporary graphical word processors Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org, users are expected to type a carriage return (enter key) between each paragraph. Formatting settings, such as first-line indentation or spacing between paragraphs, take effect where the carriage return marks the break. A non-paragraph line break, which is a soft return, is inserted using shift-enter or via the menus, and is provided for cases when the text should start on a new line but none of the other side effects of starting a new paragraph are desired.

Markup languages

In text-oriented markup languages, a soft return is typically offered as a markup tag. For example, in HTML there is a <br> tag that has the same purpose as the soft return in word processors described above.

Unicode

The Unicode character set provides a line separator character as well as a paragraph separator to represent the semantics of the soft return and hard return.

0x2028 LINE SEPARATOR

* may be used to represent this semantic unambiguously

0x2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR

* may be used to represent this semantic unambiguously