Fair enough. To most people, a space is a space. To rather more, there is a second kind of space which they expect to be non-breaking and often also expect to be fixed width. (Those who had the latter expectation have had a nasty surprise today because with the release of 4.0.1 NBSP is suddenly no longer fixed width.) The problem is that when we get beyond that we get lost in a world of typography, and in uncertainty over which spaces are supposed to be breaking or non-breaking, fixed or variable width, and if fixed what width. It would be useful to have all of this clearly laid out somewhere, so that those of us who do care about what our text looks like, but are not professional typographers, know what we should use.So perhaps the best thing to do in cases like Ernest's and mine, wherea
fixed width non-breaking space is required, is to use FIGURE SPACE, which I understand is non-breaking. But then perhaps this is too widein
some circumstances - in many fonts it is twice the regular width ofSPACE.
Going out on a limb here...
It sorta seems like the need to keep phrases like "Louis XIV" together is a valid one the deserves a solution, but it also seems fairly esoteric-- typesetters and people who give a lot of thought to the presentation of their text might use this, but most people wouldn't. This makes me wonder if it's a plain-text thing.
I'm not saying this is a problem that should be solved through markup, but if you care enough about the presentation of the text to care about this, you're probably also already using styled text to specify other things you care about, such as the font you're using. And if you know what font you're using, you can use THREE-PER-EM SPACE or FOUR-PER-EM SPACE (or maybe SIX-PER-EM SPACE or FIGURE SPACE), because you know which one is the right width in your font.
For that matter, if a typical space is usually either a third or an em or a quarter of an em wide, my guess is you could probably use either THREE-PER-EM SPACE or FOUR-PER-EM SPACE anyway, and even if this didn't exactly match the width of a space in the particular font used to render your text, it'd probably still look okay. But then again, I'm not a typographer.
Fading back into the background...
--Rich Gillam Language Analysis Systems, Inc.
Louis<THREE-PER-EM SPACE>XVI may have lost his head, but we don't want his number also to fall off on to the next line, or even to become too far separated from his name. We need to know what kind of space to use to resist the guillotine!
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
