typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), and ...

, a thin space is a

space character In computer programming, whitespace 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 ...

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

quotation mark Quotation marks (also known as quotes, quote marks, speech marks, inverted commas, or talking marks) are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an ...

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 g ...

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, known by the international abbreviation SI in all languages and sometimes pleonastically as the SI system, is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. E ...

and in many countries as a

thousands separator A decimal separator is a symbol used to separate the integer part from the fractional part of a number written in decimal form (e.g., "." in 12.45). Different countries officially designate different symbols for use as the separator. The choi ...

when writing numbers in groups of three digits, in order to facilitate reading. In

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

, thin space is encoded at . Unicode's is a non-breaking space with a width similar to that of the thin space. In

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

and

Plain TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

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

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processing software 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 platforms includin ...

, the symbol

dialog Dialog is an online information service owned by ProQuest, who acquired it from Thomson Reuters in mid-2008. Dialog was one of the predecessors of the World Wide Web as a provider of information, though not in form. The earliest form of the Dial ...

(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 Word's Symbol dialog, under font = "(normal text)", they are found in subset = "General Punctuation", Unicode character 2009 and nearby. Other word processing programs have ways of producing a thin space.

References

{{Authority control Typography Whitespace

See also

References