12.5 @w{text}: Prevent Line Breaks

@w{text} outputs text, while prohibiting line breaks within text.

Thus, you can use @w to produce a non-breakable space, fixed at the width of a normal interword space:

@w{ } @w{ } @w{ } indentation.

produces:

      indentation.

The space from @w{ }, as well as being non-breakable, also will not stretch or shrink. Sometimes that is what you want, for instance if you’re doing manual indenting. However, usually you want a normal interword space that does stretch and shrink (in the printed output); for that, see the @tie command in the next section.

You can also use the @w command to prevent TeX from automatically hyphenating a long name or phrase that happens to fall near the end of a line. makeinfo does not ever hyphenate words.

You can also use @w to avoid unwanted keyword expansion in source control systems. For example, to literally write $Id$ in your document, use @w{$}Id$. This trick isn’t effective in Info or plain text output, though.