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A second common application of non-breaking spaces is in plain text file formats such as SGML, HTML, TeX and LaTeX, whose rendering engines are programmed to treat sequences of whitespace characters (space, newline, tab, form feed, etc.) as if they were a single character (but this behavior can be overridden).
Word spacing in typography is space between words, as contrasted with letter-spacing (space between letters of words) and sentence spacing (space between sentences). Typographers may modify the spacing of letters or words in a body of type to aid readability and copy fit, or for aesthetic effect.
Conventions for spacing vary among languages, and in some languages the spacing rules are complex. [citation needed] Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere". They also provide convenient guides for where a human or program may start new lines.
In most HTML elements, a sequence of whitespace characters is treated as a single inter-word separator, which may manifest as a single space character when rendering text in a language that normally inserts such space between words. [32] Conforming HTML renderers are required to apply a more literal treatment of whitespace within a few ...
The zero-width space can be used to mark word breaks in languages without visible space between words, such as Thai, Myanmar, Khmer, and Japanese. [1] In justified text, the rendering engine may add inter-character spacing, also known as letter spacing, between letters separated by a zero-width space, unlike around fixed-width spaces. [1]
Sentence spacing concerns how spaces are inserted between sentences in typeset text and is a matter of typographical convention. [1] Since the introduction of movable-type printing in Europe, various sentence spacing conventions have been used in languages with a Latin alphabet. [2]
However, using a non-breaking space can lead to uneven justified text and additional unwanted spaces or line breaks in the text in certain programs. [8] Alternatively, sentence spacing can be controlled in HTML by separating every sentence into a separate element (e.g., a span), and using CSS to finely control sentence spacing. [9]
In many cases breaking up a word with a space would be inappropriate. Soft hyphens also creates word-break opportunities, but will add a hyphen rather than a space. In other words, a soft hyphen is a hyphen inserted into a word not otherwise hyphenated, to be displayed or typeset only if it falls at the end of a line of text.