TypeTalk: A Blizzard of White-Space Characters

Ilene Strizver

Q. I understand nonbreaking spaces after reading your post last week about them, but what are all those other white-space options in InDesign and Quark?

A. Both InDesign CS3 and 4 and Quark 7 and 8 have a collection of white-space characters intended to help you fine-tune your work. Some of these non-printing characters are more useful than others.

Em Space: Equal in width to the size of the type. For instance, in 12 point type, an em space is 12 points wide.

En Space: One half the width of an em space.

Third Space or 3-per-Em-Space: One third the width of an em space.

Quarter Space or 4-per-Em-Space: One fourth the width of an em space.

Sixth Space or 6-per-Em-Space: One sixth the width of an em space.

Thin Space: One eighth the width of an em space. Often used on either side of an em or en dash (although I prefer the kern function for this).

Hair Space: One twenty fourth the width of an em space.

Flush Space: Adds a variable amount of space to the last line of a fully justified paragraph, useful for justifying text in the last line.

Figure Space: Same width as a tabular numeral in the typeface. Can be used to help align numbers in financial tables.

Punctuation Space: Same width as the exclamation point, period, or colon in the typeface.

Nonbreaking Space or Word Joiner: When placed between two words, it prevents them from being broken at the end of a line. It’s flexible in that it can expand or compress in justified type. For more information, read this post.

Nonbreaking Space (Fixed Width) : The same as the above, but it doesn’t expand or compress in justified text.

InDesign’s white spaces are located in the Type > Insert White Space menu.

QuarkXPress

Zero Width Space: A space of no width, useful (for instance) when converting to diagonal fractions in OpenType to differentiate between values such as 21/8 (twenty-one eighths) and 2 1/8 (two and one eighth).

Ideographic Space: The fixed, full width of a character in fonts that are ideographic, such as Japanese, where all characters take up the same amount of space.

Standard Space: A flexible word space that may be altered based on the H&J settings.

Quark’s white spaces are found under Utilities > Insert Character > Special or Special (nonbreaking). Be sure to select a text box or insert your cursor to activate these choices.