A soft return is a line break that is not a paragraph break, used in word processing and text-oriented markup languages. 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, 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
