Em and En spaces

Actually you are supposed to get an en space, but it measured as an em space in Pages.

Why is it so hard to get this sort of information?

I've been right through Apple's knowledgebase.

Just reinforces how they are not the platform of choice for creative professionals. The choice being Apple's.

Peter

So, if all that is the case, what do I do to insert an em space?

It may be that your specific purposes do not require an abstention from using the Unicode characters suggested earlier. It's basically a question of how much you care about the possibility that someone might not be able to find your document by searching for a phrase where you have used an em or en space instead of the normal one, when using a search engine whose indexing system fails to treat all white space characters as equivalent to the ascii space, or in a format like pdf where the translation of non-ascii spaces can be unpredictable.

My own very limited tests indicate that Apple's Spotlight, in 10.6.2, will still find documents where non-ascii spaces are used instead the standard ones, but this is something you might want to verify for yourself with your own text and in the formats you are interested in, if the searchability issue is of importance to you.

Option hyphen = en dash: – (doesn't work in Forum but does in Pages)
Shift Option hyphen = em dash: —

Walt

Oops. Just noticed you wanted spaces. That I don't know.

Message was edited by: Walt K

Actually you are supposed to get an en space, but it measured as an em space in Pages.

But the data is U+00A0, isn't it, not 2002/3? I think in theory it should be the same size as the ordinary space for the font in question.

I think you would probably need to go to Character Palette (Edit > Special Characters) and insert them from the Code Tables (Unicode 2002 and 2003).

Character codes for the subsections of the square of the point size were carried forward from the XCCS Xerox Coded Character Set.

These character codes should not be used for spacing because they will be carried from Apple Pages into document markup (RTF, XML) and document description (PDF).

Retrieving document markup and document descriptions is less likely to be succesful if unconventional character codes are chosen by the author.

The rule is for the author to keep the content information (character information, colour information) at the highest level of abstraction for the highest success in repurposing by the audience.

In any case, in a document description precise position is done by MoveTo commands in the graphics command set with no need for these unconventional character codes.

/hh

Moich wrote:
what do I do to insert an em space? That is essentially my question.

You open the Character palette, navigate to the area 2000_2020 then you double click the character encoded 2003.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 16 novembre 2009 14:11:42

Probably a glitch but when I checked the link I ended up in Space (Euclidean and No-Euclidean) 🙂

This link seems to cover em and en spaces
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_space

Message was edited by: Jon Israel

Yes it is possible and I do know the difference between en and em dashes (em being longest of the three types of dash): type option-shift-hyphen and you will get the EM dash in Pages. The EN dash is achieved with option and hyphen keys, while the hyphen key alone gives the shortest dash. Unfortunately I cannot replicate the dashes here. By the way, the reason they are so named is that the EM dash uses the typographical space equivalent to a capital "M" which is slightly wider than that used by a capital "N."

It's basically a question of how much you care about the possibility that someone might not be able to find your document by searching for a phrase where you have used an em or en space instead of the normal one,

There is zip and zero use for the obsolete spaces inherited from the Xerox Coded Character Specification (it was a corporate specification, not a national or international standard).

If one works with a page description language like PostScript or a document description language like Interpress, PDF, PDD, or XPS, there is a fixed format geometry with an origin.

Type matter and tone matter is positioned within the fixed format geometry with pinpoint precision use move to commands.

Ironically, this simple fact is one of the main problems with Adobe's PDF where applications and systems writing out PDF substitute the SPACE character for MoveTo commands which is why ISO 19005 states that word spaces shall not be synthesised from MoveTo commands. This discussion also unfolded in the World Wide Web Consortium in 2001 and on the Unicode Mailing List in 2002.

Henrik

There is zip and zero use for the obsolete spaces

Please address your advice on this issue to Moich, who seems to think he needs to use them for something, and explain to him exactly what he has to do in Pages to accomplish whatever result he is trying to achieve by using them.

Agreed Tom.

Henrik seems to ignore the everyday needs of graphic designers, whether typographic, color, production etc.

I guess he never has had to do them so they don't seem relevant to him.

I do however understand his concerns about the readability of pdf files.

Peter

Moich

I had a look at how it is done in Indesign which has considerable support for these things, but there too there is no keyboard shortcut that I could find, they do it via a palette as well.

Maybe it is a well hidden list somewhere, that a more enthusiastic ID user can point me to.

QuarkXpress had an application level shortcut for them but that was pre OSX and Unicode fonts.

Peter

Thanks very much for that Walt,

It doesn't show any way of typing the characters though.

However that just made me think of a way around it.

You could use the wildcard formula and match this in +Preferences > Auto-correction+ with the glyphs in the Characters Chooser.

Just tried it with an en space, it works but don't use the carat symbol, OSX interprets this as a dead accent key.

Peter