Ancient Hebrew and Arabic did use spaces partly to compensate in clarity for the lack of vowels. Spaces were not used to separate words in Latin until roughly 600–800 AD. Modern English uses a space to separate words, but not all languages follow this practice. Precision is limited by physical capabilities of output devices. Similarly, word processors can "fully justify" text, stretching inter-word spaces to make all lines the same length (as can mechanical Linotype machines). By drawing each word at a specific starting coordinate, such programs need not "draw" spaces at all (this can lead to difficulties in extracting the correct text back out). For example, SVG, PostScript, and countless other languages enable drawing characters at specific (x,y) coordinates on a screen or page. Formatting and drawing languages and software commonly provide much more flexibility in spacing.Collectively, such characters are called Whitespace characters. For example, Unicode U+20 is the "normal" space character, but U+A0 adds the meaning that a new line should not be started there, while U+2003 represents a space with a fixed width of one em. Character encodings such as Unicode provide spaces of several widths, which are encoded using distinct numeric code points.Ĭomputer representation of text facilitates getting around mechanical and physical limitations such as character widths in at least two ways: Following widespread acceptance of the typewriter, some typewriter conventions influenced typography and the design of printed works. The typewriter, on the other hand, typically has only one width for all characters, including spaces. Unlike graphic characters, typeset spaces are commonly stretched in order to align text. Typesetting can use spaces of varying widths, just as it can use graphic characters of varying widths. They also provide convenient guides for where a human or program may start new lines. Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. Conventions for spacing vary among languages, and in some languages the spacing rules are complex. In writing, a space ( ) is a blank area that separates words, sentences, syllables (in syllabification) and other written or printed glyphs (characters). U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE (, &NonBreakingSpace ) U+0020 SPACE ( Note: Representations here of a regular space are replaced with a no-break space)
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