Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-27331024-20151112141020/@comment-27331024-20151113204445

BunsenH wrote: KariCre8s wrote: This statement; "The value and the unit need to be separated by a non-breaking thin space," plus what I have read on some wikipedia pages all sound like this  to me. XD My son showed me this video last night and I laughed because that was how I was feeling at the time when trying to understand working in source mode.

I do however like the challenge of learning something new. Heh. For what it's worth... I'm handy with tools, and good at fixing things. There's not much around the house that I'm not willing to open up and try to repair. But for my girlfriend's car, I'm reluctant to deal with even the basic maintenance things. I know almost nothing about cars. That's her department.

Kudos to your girlfriend for knowing about cars.:) We all have our different areas of strength. My DH needed my help to build a ramp to our shed and reconfigure a faucet connection, because I understand the drawings better. Besides, I could never do what he does for a living.

In the interest of "learning something new": typesetting is something of an art. Especially when one is dealing with equations or formulae, there can be a lot of tweaking of font size and especially spacing to provide subtle visual cues which make the meaning clearer. To take a simple example, "Add 2.5&#8239;mL of solution A". One uses a slightly thinner space than usual between the "2.5" and the "mL" to indicate that they're attached to each other as a single thing. And it's important that if that text was at the end of a line on a page, the line shouldn't break in between those bits, leaving the number at the end of a line and the unit at the beginning of the next line.

Or if one is quoting through more than one level of quotation marks: "&#8239;'But no living man am I!  You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter...'&#8239;" Some space is needed between the double quote and the single, but a full space is too much, and again it's important that a line break not split things at that point. So: a non-breaking thin space. There's also the regular thin space, which might be used in some case where it doesn't matter if there's a line break. (I can't think of a good example off-hand, mind you.)  If you look at the source for this message, say by quoting it and then going to source mode, you'll see that I had to use some gobbledegook ("&amp;#8239;") to get that non-breaking thin space, while a regular thin space can be generated somwhat more simply (or at least more legibly) with "&amp;thinsp;".

And to get those bits to display properly in this message, I had to do more kludging to create the '&' characters so the bits wouldn't appear as the spaces that they represent. Again, thanks to weird behaviour of the wiki software.

Thanks for this info. You would make a great instructor if you are not one already. I have taken some Word and Excel classes at a local Tech school, but this is all different to me. (OK, now I hope I did this all correctly. :P)