- Hard space
In
typesetting andtext editor s, the term "hard space" has several meanings, all related to a special way of representing thewhitespace between characters.*The most commonly used meaning is the same as
non-breaking space : a special space character used by aword processor that forbids an automatic line breaking (line wrap ) at its position. A hard space on a PC is commonly entered by holding down the ALT key and pressing 0160 (ieUnicode character U+00A0) on the numeric pad (In some applications "CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE" can also be used).*In earlier days of
text editor s that worked withtext mode CRT displays, when a paragraph had to be justified, this was achieved by means of inserting extra soft spaces at whitespaces. The soft spaces were so called because they could be "compressed" away during further editing. By contrast, ordinary spaces were called "hard" or "incompressible" spaces.*Also, in some older text editors, the hard spaces were both "non-expandable"—i.e., no soft spaces could be added to them—and non-breaking ones.
See also
*
Control character
*Space (punctuation)
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