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Revision as of 23:53, 6 August 2007

It has been suggested that this article be merged into Non-breaking space. (Discuss) Proposed since August 2007.

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In computing, the term hard space has several meanings, all related to a special way of representing the whitespace between characters.

• The most commonly used meaning is the same as non-breaking space: a special space character used by a word processor that forbids an automatic line breaking (line wrap) at its position. A hard space on a PC is commonly entered by holding down the ALT key and pressing 0160 on the numeric pad (In some applications CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE can also be used).

• In earlier days of text editors that worked with text mode CRT displays, when a paragraph had to be justified, this was achieved by means of inserting extra soft spaces at whitespaces. The soft spaces were so called because they could be "compressed" away during further editing. By contrast, ordinary spaces were called hard or incompressible spaces.

• Also, in some older text editors, the hard spaces were both non-expandable—i.e., no soft spaces could be added to them—and non-breaking ones.

See also

• Control character
• Space (punctuation)

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