Can URLs be broken “correctly” in end-of-line situations?
As a designer who often works with large amounts of text, I run into this problem all the time. Chicago Manual of Style Online says: “when a URL must be broken over a line in a printed work, breaking after a slash is preferable (also break after a double slash). On the other hand, breaking a URL after a dot (leaving what looks like a period at the end of a line) might cause difficulties for the reader. It would be better to place the dot at the beginning of the next line. Using a hyphen to break a long word at the end of a line is not a good idea, since some URLs contain hyphens as part of the address; moreover, a hyphen that’s part of a URL should never appear at the end of a line. For more, see paragraph 17.11 in CMOS 15.”
My dad also sent me this bit of info that he ran across online, which is helpful, although I don’t know the source:
Good luck to us all… but this is a good start!
