@mclean ,
Edit: It appears that Jive strips all of the & followed by nbsp; and just puts in a space, so I've had to go through and edit the document. Hopefully I caught all references. Ignore the space I had to add to them.
I'm not a big fan of & nbsp; -- in fact, I have a macro written that will go through and replace all occurrences of them with a regular space. Canvas tends to put them in when they're not needed. About the only time I use them is when I need the units on a number to stick with the number, but that is very rarely in anything I do inside Canvas.
That said, here's a hack. You'll still have to go into the HTML editor, but at least it's easier to enter them in the first place.
When you press the space bar you get a regular space. Additional presses of the space bar add & nbsp;. This is undesirable for all of us who learned to double space at the end of a sentence and still do it sometimes. I don't want additional spaces, I want a single space. Other programs, like DreamWeaver, won't let me enter additional spaces without specifically making them a non-breaking one with a special keystroke like you mentioned (shift+space).
Anyway, what you have is a regular space followed by a non-breaking space. Unfortunately for you, if you try to remove either space, the Rich Content Editor will strip out the & nbsp; and leave just the regular space.
So, here's the hack.
You can double space wherever you want a non-breaking space to appear. Then switch to the HTML editor mode and search for a regular space followed by & nbsp;. In the HTML editor mode, you strip out the regular space from the beginning, leaving just the & nbsp; and it will keep it.
Still not as quick as having a dedicated keystroke, but perhaps faster than manually inserting the & nbsp; yourself.
Another hack that still requires the HTML editor portion is to type your document as normal using the Rich Content Editor. Then switch to the HTML editor when you are done and find the place where you need the non-breaking spaces to be. Remove the regular space that's there and hit Option+Space on your Mac. It will insert what looks like a regular space, but it's really a non-breaking space and when you switch back or save it will convert to & nbsp;. & nbsp;Trying this& nbsp;directly from the Rich Content Editor (not the HTML editor) will just give you a regular space.
