Bill Potts wrote:
(The) use of the non-breaking space ... would produce a wide space (rather than an ordinary, thin space) on at least some Macintosh- based browsers. As I am not an Apple user, I don't know if that's still the case.
I'm an Apple Macintosh user and can tell you that the non-breaking space is available in "Pages", Apple's word processor. It is entered by typing (control)-(space bar). Furthermore, this produces a non- breaking space of exactly the same size as a normal space.
As previously noted, this allows one to put the obligatory space between a number and its associated unit, yet prevent them from being separated at the end of a line of print (it prevents the number from appearing on the end of one line with the unit on the beginning of the next line).
I see no reason why MS Word, MS Publisher, MS Front Page, etc. would not be able to do the same thing on on Macintosh machine if, as Bill notes, those applications can do it on PC machines. The Mac can run Windows and all Windows applications, and those apps run on the Mac just as well as they do on a PC. (There even is some data that shows that some Windows programs work BETTER on a Mac.)
I will add, however, that on my Apple email program (named "Mail"), the (control)-(space) combination does NOT produce a non-breaking space. There is no error if you type that combination but it just produces an ordinary space.
Bill Hooper 73 kg body mass* Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA * plus or minus a kilogram or so.
