typography Typography is the art and technique of Typesetting, arranging type to make written language legibility, legible, readability, readable and beauty, appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, Point (typogra ...

, a thin space is a

space character A whitespace character is a character data element that represents white space when text is rendered for display by a computer. For example, a ''space'' character (, ASCII 32) represents blank space such as a word divider in a Western scri ...

whose width is usually or of an em. It is used to add a narrow space, such as between nested

quotation mark Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the sam ...

s or to separate

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

s that interfere with one another. It is not as narrow as the hair space. It is also used in the

International System of Units The International System of Units, internationally known by the abbreviation SI (from French ), is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. It is the only system of measurement with official s ...

and in many countries as a

thousands separator alt=Four types of separating decimals: a) 1,234.56. b) 1.234,56. c) 1'234,56. d) ١٬٢٣٤٫٥٦., Both a full_stop.html" ;"title="comma and a full stop">comma and a full stop (or period) are generally accepted decimal separators for interna ...

when writing numbers in groups of three digits, in order to facilitate reading. It also avoids the ambiguity of the comma, used as a thousands separator in many countries but as a decimal point in Europe. In

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, thin space is encoded at . Some text editors, such as IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, will display the character as its suggested abbreviation of "THSP". Unicode's is a

non-breaking space In word processing and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space (), also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space ...

with a width similar to that of the thin space. In

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

and Plain TeX, \thinspace produces a narrow,

non-breaking space In word processing and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space (), also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space ...

. Inside and outside of math formulae in LaTeX, \, also produces a narrow, non-breaking space. In all versions of

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

and in some of

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

, the special characters and symbols dialog (often available via ''Insert > Symbol'' or ''Insert > Special Characters''), has both the thin space and the narrow no-break space available for point-and-click insertion. In LibreOffice's Symbol dialog, there is an easy-to-find box field to narrow the searching; in Word's Symbol dialog, under font = "(normal text)", the characters are found in subset = "General Punctuation", Unicode character 2009 and nearby. Other word processing programs and in many Linux configurations, have ways of producing a thin space using keyboard shortcuts.

References

{{Authority control Typography Whitespace

See also

References