The hard space: an invisible refinement

Can there be anyone who likes seeing ‘century’ at the end of one line and its Roman numerals at the beginning of the next line? To prevent this from happening, we have a special character: the hard or nonbreaking space. The operating systems and applications we use when typing provide the tools for inserting this space. It is not an isolated figure in the repertoire of print characters: there is a whole family of spaces. Indeed, its use simply means paying greater attention to the composition of a text.