Usage notes

The width of a space varies among different fonts and renderers. In electronic documents, most renderers introduce line breaks (wrap the line) at the last breaking space when a line of text exceeds the available display width, and will expand all normal spaces to justify columns of text. The non-breaking space, ] [, is an alternative to the usual space that can be entered to prevent a line of text from wrapping at its position, and may be used for example between a digit and a unit of measurement, such as 60 km/hr. The non-breaking space will not expand in justified text, and is the preferred white-space character to carry combining diacritics that do not have spacing variants in the font, such as with U+0311 to create / ̑/ as the long falling toneme in Serbo-Croatian.

In traditional metal type, the width of an 'em space' is the type size in points, whereas an 'en space' is half that. Thus, in 12-point text, an em space is 12 points wide, an en space 6 points, a three-per-em ('thick') space 4 points, a four-per-em ('mid') space 3 points, a six-per-em space 2 points, and a hairline space less than that. These conventions largely carry over into electronic documents, though whereas a 'thin space' is nominally five-per-em, in computer typography it may be conflated with six-per-em.

The figure space is used to align columns of numbers. It's the tabular width of the font, that is, the width of a digit in typefaces that have fixed-width digits. A punctuation space is the width of narrow punctuation such as a full stop, and is used for example to separate the thousands in strings of digits. Unicode defines a medium mathematical space as four-eighteenths of an em.

See also

• ␠Category:Translingual terms with non-redundant manual script codes#%20, ␣Category:Translingual terms with non-redundant manual script codes#%20, ] [ (“a visual symbol that represents the space”)Category:Translingual terms with non-redundant manual script codes#%20
• quadrat

Usage notes

• In traditional French typography, the non-breaking space should be a narrow one, called a espace fine insécable in French; however, due to technological restraints, a normal non-breaking space is used in its place. Nonetheless, in everyday French, a normal space is often used instead.
• In standard Quebec orthography, the non-breaking space should only be used before :, between « », before %, before currency symbols, and between opening and closing –.^[1]