Misplaced Pages

Hard space

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Smith609 (talk | contribs) at 19:37, 5 August 2007 (More appropriate merge header). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 19:37, 5 August 2007 by Smith609 (talk | contribs) (More appropriate merge header)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
It has been suggested that this article be merged into Non-breaking space. (Discuss)
This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Hard space" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

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

Stub icon

This computer science article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Categories: