The most commonly used meaning is the same as that forbids an automatic line breaking ( Line Wrap ) at its position. A hard space on a PC is commonly entered by holding down the ALT key and pressing 0160 on the Numeric Pad , or by pressing '' CTRL +ALT+SPACE''.
In earlier days of Text Editor s that worked with Text ModeCRTDisplay s, when a paragraph has to be Justified , this achieved by means of inserting extra soft spaces at Whitespace s. The soft spaces were so called because they could be "compressed" away during further editing. By contrast, ordinary spaces were called ''hard'' or ''incompressible'' spaces.
Also, in some older text editors, the hard spaces were both ''non-expandable''—i.e., no soft spaces could be added to them—and non-breaking ones.
