XML Breaks, Hyphens and Spaces

(C) 1997 Rick Jelliffe: Not for publication in any printed form whatsoever.
Online use and distribution is permitted.

Here is a summary of the special characters available to force particular spacing and breaking effects:

ISO Entity SPREAD Entity XML
Numeric
Character
Reference
Description
- - - Hyphen or minus
(ambiguous)
‐ &U2010; ‐ Hyphen
&U2011; ‑ Non-breaking hyphen
− &U2212; − Minus
­ &U00AD; &#AD; Soft hyphen
&zwsp;
(non-standard)
&U200B; ​ Zero-width space
a soft word-break
(i.e. a point where a line break
can occur without causing a hyphen to appear
&zwnbsp;
(non-standard)
&UFEFF;  Zero-width non-breaking space
(i.e. line break suppression)
 
&U00A0;   Non-breaking space
&U2000;   En quad
(fixed width)
&U2001;   Em quad
(fixed width)
  &U2002;   En space
  &U2003;   Em space
 
&U2007;   Digit space
  &U2008;   Punctuation space
  &U2009;   Thin space
(Similar to HTML
<BR> tag, as far as
presentation)
&U2028; &#x2028; Hard return
(Similar to HTML
<P> tag, as far as
presentation)
&U2029; &#x2029; Paragraph separator
&ispace;
(non-standard)
&U3000; &#x3000; Ideographic space
(not collapseable)