
Space Yourself (2015) - aorth
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/10/space-yourself/
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abdulhaq
I enjoyed this little foray into the wilds of the Unicode(TM) landscape and
typographic emptiness. As an aside, my interest in typography is matched by my
interest in maps, and I've met numerous other men who share an interest in
both typography and maps - is it a male trait, and what's the link between the
two (if any)?

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oneeyedpigeon
As a web dev with a secret love for typography, I use these all the time in
similar situations e.g. the hair space around em-dashes. I'm also trying,
where possible, to ensure our CMS auto-corrects just for things like em-dashes
in the first place; our writers find it difficult to use all the
typographically correct punctuation, particularly when keyboard support is
fairly weak.

On that issue (sort of), which text editor is best for supporting this kind of
thing? Ideally, I want something that a) makes it easy to insert Unicode
characters e.g. based on a name lookup b) more clearly identifies the exact
Unicode character my cursor is on. It would be useful if, in both cases,
common punctuation (these spaces, dashes, quotes) were flagged particularly
'well', but a general solution would be a good start.

~~~
molteanu
Emacs has the interactive built-in function insert-char (C-x 8 RET). You are
prompted for the hex value or the Unicode name. It has autocompletion via the
TAB key, so you can easily navigate through the Unicode names. Use describe-
char to get info about the character you are currently on. See also Xah's
page:
[http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_n_unicode.html](http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_n_unicode.html)

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jessriedel
It's a sad implication of the publishing model in physics that I'm very
familiar with most of the ideas in this piece. Academia cries out for a
successor to LaTeX.

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breck
Interesting. Could these different space character alter the meaning of a
sentence in other languages and not just the presentation? Example:

    
    
      "carpet" !== "car pet" but "car       pet" === "car pet".
    

The space between two letters can be described by 1 bit. Are there non-latin
alphabets where it would take more than 1 bit to represent this information?

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aorth
I learned to like em and en dashes as grammatical devices but was undecided
about the space around them — "regular" spaces are too much, but having them
flush with the surrounding text was equally undesirable. The "hair" space fits
the bit fantastically, and it doesn't require HTML, CSS, or any special fonts!

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valine
Sometimes I use hair spaces to quickly try out a new kerning. It's also fun to
change your tracking from time to time.

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abapat
This is like a success story, replacing a legacy typesetting system with
`most` of its features into a digital equivalent. So much harder to achieve
with business processes in general.

