2002-10-13 I agree with Joseph Reid on his assessment below. I feel that only letter symbols, be they Latin or Greek, should require a space. Non letter symbols, such as �, ', ", etc. don't need a space.
Somehow, I think the habit of putting letter symbols right up against numbers like "32km" instead of '32 km" stems from the practice of FFU symbols " and ' being placed without a space next to the number.. The only thing I disagree with is that degree Celsius should drop the degree. In this would happen, what would the symbol be? It can't be just C, as that is the symbol for Coulomb. John D'accord! A common error in the UK is to omit the space. Does 32lm mean 321 metres or 32 lumens? But I would like an exception to be made in the case of the degree Celsius. In the case of angles, 30� is correct, but 30�C is considered to be incorrect. Why? There is no possibility of misunderstanding. We are faced here with two competing anomalies: either anomalous treatment of the degree symbol or an exception for the degree Celsius among metric units. A possible solution would be to rename the "degree Celsius" as simply the "celsius".
