Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-27331024-20151112141020/@comment-24577221-20151113174550

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     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.

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.