| Space Character |
Article Index for Space |
Website Links For Space |
Information AboutSpace Character |
|
In writing, a space ( ) is any empty (non-written) zone between written sections. However, the term is usually used to refer to an empty zone used for Interword Separation (''interword space''). Conventions about the presence and size of interword spaces vary from language to language, and in some cases may be quite complex. Many different '''space characters''' are available in computing Character sets for representing spaces of different sizes and meaning. USE OF THE SPACE IN NATURAL LANGUAGES See Also: Interword separation Modern English uses a standard space to separate words. Conventions vary with regard to spacing around punctuation, such as the Full Stop (period) (see Full Stop and French Spacing ), Exclamation Mark , Question Mark , and Dash (see below). Not all languages use spaces between words. Spaces were not used to separate words in and Japanese (except when written with little or no Kanji ) still do not, but modern Korean uses spaces. USE OF THE SPACE IN COMPUTING In Programming Language syntax, spaces are frequently used to explicitly separate Tokens . Aside from this use, spaces and other Whitespace Character s are usually ignored by modern programming languages. Exceptions are Haskell , ABC , and Python , which use the amount of whitespace in indentation to indicate the bounds of a block, and a whimsical language called Whitespace , where whitespace is the only meaningful syntactical element. Text Editors , Word Processor s, and Desktop Publishing Software differ in how they represent Whitespace on the screen, and how they represent spaces at the ends of lines longer than the screen or column width. In some cases, spaces are shown simply as blank space; in other cases they may be represented by an Interpunct or other symbols. Many different characters (described below) could be used to produce spaces, and non-character functions (such as margins and tab settings) can also affect whitespace. SPACE CHARACTERS AND DIGITAL TYPOGRAPHY The variable-width general-purpose space In computer Character Encoding s, there is a normal general-purpose space ( Unicode character ; 32 decimal) whose width will vary according to the design of the typeface. Typical values range from 1/5-em to 1/3-em (in digital typography an Em is equal to the nominal size of the font, so for a 10-point font the space will probably be between 2 and 3.3 points). Sophisticated fonts will have differently sized spaces for bold, italic, and small-caps faces, and often compositors will manually adjust the width of the space depending on the size and prominence of the text. In addition to this general-purpose space, it is possible to encode a space of a specific width. See the table below for a complete list. (In monospaced Proofreading copy, only em- and en-spaces are represented using this character (which is called an ''em-quad'' or an ''en-quad''), while other types of spaces are represented with a Number Sign. ) Breaking and non-breaking spaces When rendered, the generic Unicode space is often considered insignificant when appearing at the end of a line of text, or when part of a sequence of whitespace characters, so it may be omitted or "collapsed" in such circumstances. The Non-breaking Space , (160 decimal), renders the same as a normal space but is expressly non-collapsible. It is often used to prevent line wrapping or to indent text, though some World Wide Web authorities discourage using it for those purposes. Hair spaces around dashes Typically, an and renderer capabilities. Table of Spaces Unicode defines several space characters with specific semantics and rendering characteristics, as shown in the table below. Depending on the browser and fonts used to view this table, not all spaces may display properly: Unicode also provides some visible characters to stand in for space when necessary in the "Control Pictures" block: the Symbol For Space (U+2420), the Blank Symbol (U+2422), and the Open Box (U+2423). Space characters in markup languages Space characters appearing in inconsequential places within element start tags in both XML and HTML are generally ignored by processors of those markup languages. For example, spaces that appear on either side of the " =" that separates an attribute name from its value have no effect on the interpretation of the document. Element end tags can contain trailing spaces, and empty-element tags in XML can contain spaces before the "/> |
|
|