Non-breaking space - Citizendia

For non-breaking space usage on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Line break handling.

In computer-based text processing and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space or no-break space (NBSP) is a variant of the space character that prevents an automatic line break (line wrap) at its position. Word processing is the creation of documents using a Word processor. Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in graphic form on Paper or some other medium. In writing a space () is a blank area that is devoid of content which separates words letters numbers and punctuation Word wrap or line wrap is the feature supported by most Text editors Word processors, and Web browsers of automatically replacing some It is also known as a hard space or fixed space. In Typesetting and Text editors the term hard space has several meanings all related to a special way of representing the Whitespace between

1 Explanation
2 Use as non-collapsing whitespace
3 Use in typesetting
4 Encodings
5 Keyboard entry methods
6 Other types
7 See also

Explanation

The difference between an NBSP and a normal space is that, when a string including the NBSP comes at the end of the line, and is too long to fit, it will move the whole string to the next line (including the strings that the NBSP connects to). This is analogous to how normal strings wrap. For example, the string "ambidextrously" will never be "broken", and neither will the string "am bi dextrous ly" when the spaces are nonbreaking.

Use as non-collapsing whitespace

A second common application of the NBSP characters is in plain text file formats for word processing applications (e. In Computing, plain text is a term used for an ordinary "unformatted" sequential file readable as textual material without much processing g. , SGML, HTML, TeX, LaTeX) that treat sequences of white-space characters (such as space, newline, tabulator, form feed, etc. The Standard Generalized Markup Language ( ISO 88791986 SGML) is an ISO Standard Metalanguage in which one can define Markup languages HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure TeX (ˈtɛx as in Greek, often /ˈtɛk/ in English; written with a lowercase 'e' in imitation of the logo is a Typesetting system designed and mostly LaTeX (ˈleɪtɛ In Computer science, whitespace is any single character or series of characters that represents horizontal or vertical space in Typography. ) exactly as if they were a single character. Such collapsing of whitespace allows the author of the plain text file to neatly arrange the text in this form (e. g. , by line breaks and indentation), without affecting the typeset result of the line-breaking algorithm.

The no-break space character is not merged with any other neighboring whitespace characters in such applications, and can therefore be used by an author to explicitly insert additional visible space in the formatted text.

Use in typesetting

Non-breaking spaces are used in typesetting where visual separation does not imply line-breakability. Examples are the spaces between words and punctuation in traditional typesetting's spacing rules. In French spacing, for example, a non-breaking space is inserted between words and their enclosing quotation marks and between the last word of a sentence and a question mark.

Encodings

In Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, NBSP is U+00A0. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's The Universal Character Set (UCS defined by the ISO / IEC 10646 International Standard, is a standard set of characters upon which
In ISO/IEC 8859, NBSP is 0xA0. ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC standard for 8-bit Character encodings for use by computers
In KOI8-R, NBSP is 0x9A. KOI8-R is an 8-bit Character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet
In EBCDIC, it is 0x41. Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code ( EBCDIC) is an 8- Bit Character encoding ( Code page) used on IBM mainframe Operating
In CP437 and CP850, NBSP is 0xFF. IBM PC or MS-DOS Code page 437, often abbreviated CP437 and also known as DOS-US, OEM-US or sometimes misleadingly referred Code page 850 is a Code page that was used in western Europe under systems such as DOS.
In SGML and HTML, the character entity reference   or the numeric character references   or   represent NBSP. The Standard Generalized Markup Language ( ISO 88791986 SGML) is an ISO Standard Metalanguage in which one can define Markup languages HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure In the Markup languages SGML, HTML, XHTML and XML, a character entity reference is a reference to a particular kind of named A numeric character reference (NCR is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML.
In Wikitext, the character entity reference   often represents NBSP. Wikitext language or wiki markup is a Markup language that offers a simplified alternative to HTML and is used to write pages in
In TeX and LaTeX, a tilde (~) is used to denote the hard space. TeX (ˈtɛx as in Greek, often /ˈtɛk/ in English; written with a lowercase 'e' in imitation of the logo is a Typesetting system designed and mostly LaTeX (ˈleɪtɛ The tilde (~ (/ˈtɪldə/ is a Grapheme with several uses The name of the character comes from Spanish, from the Latin titulus
In ASCII, not defined. American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII)

Keyboard entry methods

None of the existing national or international standards on keyboard layouts currently define an input method for the NBSP character. QWERTY keyboardjpg|thumb|right|300px|QWERTY keyboard on a Laptop of 2007]]A keyboard layout is any specific mechanical, visual, or functional Therefore, the authors of keyboard drivers or application programs (e. g. , word processors) had to invent their own keyboard shortcuts. A keyboard shortcut (or accelerator key, shortcut key, hot key, key binding, keybinding, key combo, etc For example:

OPTION+SPACE: Mac OS
ALT+0160: Microsoft Windows
CTRL+K N S: vim (see vim digraphs)
CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE: Microsoft Word
CTRL+SPACE: WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org
Insert | Symbol dialog box (Latin-1 subset, after ~): many office applications

Other types

Unicode defines several other no-break space characters that differ from the regular space in width:

No-break thin space, known in Unicode as "NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE" (U+202F). Mac OS is the trademarked name for a series of Graphical user interface -based Operating systems developed by Apple Inc Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Vim is a Text editor first released by Bram Moolenaar in 1991 for the Amiga computer Microsoft Word is Microsoft 's flagship word processing software. WordPerfect is a proprietary Word processing application At the height of its popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was the De facto OpenOfficeorg ( OOo or OOo) is a free Cross-platform office application suite available for a number of different computer In Computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office software suite or productivity suite is a Software suite intended to be used by typical This is required for French punctuation (before ?, ! or ;). Punctuation in French (or French punctuation) is a term used in some Microsoft documents as a partial proxy for French spacing rules in the period following the recent
Word joiner, encoded in Unicode 3. 2 and above as U+2060. The word-joiner does not normally produce any space but prohibits a line break on either side of it.
The Byte Order Mark, U+FEFF, officially named "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE", can also be used with the same meaning as the word joiner, but in current documents this use is deprecated. A byte-order mark ( BOM) is the Unicode character at code point U+FEFF ("zero-width no-break space" when that character is used to denote

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