How big is a space? Not space, the final frontier. We’re talking about the much smaller spaces you type on your keyboard. It’s the space you create with the space bar, as well as specific lengths of space that require special keystrokes and can vary depending on the font you’re using.
Character Spacing in Word
Not all spaces are created equal. And spaces between words and sentences vary across the world’s many written languages. For the purposes of this article on spaces, we’ll stick primarily to the English language and spaces most commonly used in typography. We’ll also discuss web spaces. These are generally whitespace characters. (Related to, but not to be confused with, the design principle of whitespace.)
Did you know that not all languages put a space between words? And the space between sentences varies too. The debate over one space or two between sentences goes back and forth. Sometimes there are more spaces on one side, and sometimes the two spaces drive the discussion. In typeset material, one space is the preferred number of spaces. (Disagree? Many people do.) A happy medium might be to use a space character other than the default one you get when you press the space bar.
It’s not just the space between words and sentences that’s a problem in print and on the web. There are common conventions when it comes to spacing before or after certain symbols and abbreviations. In English, there’s typically no space between a number and the percent sign (%), but it’s not necessarily wrong to write 15% instead of 15%. In other languages, though, a space before the % is the norm. Sometimes spaces are used to improve the appearance of the text rather than because of a specific style guide. For example, in some fonts, a designer might decide that an em dash needs a little space to separate it from surrounding text — like this, instead of — like this.
