Jason Crosse wrote: > I've got a pretty basic question. How wide is a typographical space > in relative units?
It's an interesting question, though not a CSS question as such. It may be relevant in CSS authoring, though, since you can turn a space into an element and then try to set its width. This would be somewhat tricky, though; instead, you would normally set padding or other properties for non-blank elements. The width of the Ascii SPACE character varies by font. Moreover, when justification (text-align: justify) is applied, spaces may get stretched as needed. Other space characters may have specific widths assigned to them, but they are generally more or useless in web authoring; see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html > I want to pad a one-line element's left side so > it looks like a space has been inserted. If I understand you correctly, you can just put a NO-BREAK SPACE (U+00A0) there, either as such (if you know how to type it - e.g., Alt+0160 works in most applications on Windows) or as the entity reference . As a character, it is a clone of SPACE with the added feature that it is "non-breaking" when formatting text into lines. In practice, it has the same width as SPACE, though it is not stretchable in justification. > Is there a reliable way of doing this (e.g 0.5ex;), or does is just > depend on how big a given font's space is? The ex unit is not really reliable for anything, because IE incorrectly implements it as half of em whereas e.g. Firefox correctly implements it as the x-height of the font, which is in practice always either smaller or larger than 0.5em. I have a web page about this, don't I... http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/x-height.html But you don't need the ex unit here, or CSS at all for this purpose, unless I misunderstood your question. > If it's dependent on the font, is there a traditional proportion > that's widely used across popular fonts? Microsoft's typography page (which is not to be taken as an authority, just as a description of an important manufacturer's approach) says: - The minimum value should be no less than 1/5 the em, which is equivalent to the value of a thin space in traditional typesetting. - For an average width font a good value is ~1/4 the em. - For a wide width font a good value is ~1/3 the em. - The maximum width should be no greater than 1/2 the em, which is equivalent to the en space of a typeface. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/spaces.htm So if you had a situation where you wanted, for some reason, to set e.g. the left padding of an element to match the width of a space, then padding-left: 0.25em would probably be the best guess in general. Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca") http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
