Whitespace Character

A Whitespace Character is an Orthographic Character that some Writing Systems use to demarcate Orthographic Words.

• AKA: Whitespace, Space Character.
• See: Pause, Orthographic Word Segmentation Task.

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References

2009

• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(computer_science)
  • In computer science, whitespace is any single character or series of characters that represents horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visual mark, but typically does occupy an area on a page. For example, the common whitespace symbol " " (the Unicode character at the 32nd code point) represents a blank space, as used between words and sentences in Western scripts.
  • The term whitespace is based on the assumption that the background color used for rendered text is white, and is thus confusing if it is not.
• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(punctuation)
  • In writing, a space () is a blank area that is devoid of content, which separates words, letters, numbers, and punctuation. Conventions for interword and intersentence spaces vary among languages, and in some cases the spacing rules are quite complex.
  • The Latin alphabet, used for English, was originally written scripta continua, without any word separators. Later interpuncts, centred dots, were added to make reading easier, and replaced with spaces after 600–800 AD. In typesetting, spaces have historically been of multiple lengths with particular space-lengths being used for specific typographic purposes, such as separating words or separating sentences or separating punctuation from words. Following the invention of the typewriter and the subsequent overlap of designer style-preferences and computer-technology limitations, much of this reader-centric variation has been lost in normal use.
  • In computer representation of text, spaces of various sizes, styles, or language characteristics (different space characters) are indicated with unique code points.

1996

• (Wall et al., 1996) ⇒ Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Randal L. Schwartz. (1996). “Programming Perl, 2nd edition." O'Reilly. ISBN:1565921496
  • whitespace: A character that moves your cursor around but doesn't otherwise put anything on your screen. Typically refers to any of the following: space, tab, line feed, carriage return, form feed, or vertical tab.

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