Space (punctuation)

In writing, a space ( ) is a blank area devoid of content, serving to separate words, letters, numbers, and punctuation. Conventions for interword and intersentence spaces vary among languages, and in some cases the spacing rules are quite complex. In the classical period, Latin was written with interpuncts (centred dots) as word separators, but that practice was abandoned sometime around 200 CE in favour of scriptio continua, i.e., with the words running together without any word separators. In around 600–800 CE, blank spaces started being inserted between words in Latin, and that practice carried over to all languages using the Latin alphabet (including English and most other Western European languages).

In typesetting, spaces have historically been of multiple lengths with particular space-lengths being used for specific typographic purposes, such as separating words or separating sentences or separating punctuation from words. Following the invention of the typewriter and the subsequent overlap of designer style-preferences and computer-technology limitations, much of this reader-centric variation was lost in normal use.

Whitespace character

In computer science, white space is any character or series of characters that represent horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visible mark, but typically does occupy an area on a page. For example, the common whitespace symbol U+0020   SPACE (HTML  ), also ASCII 32, represents a blank space punctuation character in text, used as a word divider in Western scripts.

Overview

With many keyboard layouts, a horizontal whitespace character may be entered through the use of a spacebar. Horizontal white space may also be entered on many keyboards through the use of the Tab ↹ key, although the length of the space may vary. Vertical white space is a bit more varied as to how it is encoded, but the most obvious in typing is the ↵ Enter result which creates a 'newline' code sequence in applications programs. Older keyboards might instead say Return, abbreviating the typewriter keyboard meaning 'Carriage-Return' which generated an electromechanical return to the left stop (CR code in ASCII-hex &0D;) and a line feed or move to the next line (LF code in ASCII-hex &0A;); in some applications these were independently used to draw text cell based displays on monitors or for printing on tractor-guided printers—which might also contain reverse motions/positioning code sequences allowing yesterdays text base fancier displays. Many early computer games used such codes to draw a screen (e.g., Kingdom of Kroz).