Word spacing 2026-11-05
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Word spacing is the separation between adjacent words in a line of text. Its nominal value comes from the computer font and layout settings; text justification can adjust it through typesetting glue. Letter spacing instead changes spacing within the text's sequence of letters. A script without visible word separators needs a different spacing strategy from an English sentence.[ref]
Suppose three typesetting boxes have widths 8, 6 and 10, and the two intervening spaces each have width 3. The natural line width is
(1)
Adding 1 to each space gives width 32. Adding 1 to every glyph advance would generally produce a different layout, because there need not be one glyph per word or per stored character. Word spacing must therefore be applied to the intended separators rather than inferred from a count of glyphs.
In CSS, word-spacing: 1px specifies additional spacing at the relevant word separators; it does not set every interword gap to exactly one CSS pixel.[ref]
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