Spaced text

What it's for

Putting a space between one letter and the next is a typographic trick as old as printing: it widens the word, slows it down and makes it read like a shop sign. On social media it's the simplest way to make a heading stand out where bold doesn't exist: a profile bio, the name of a collection, the opening of a caption, the title of a poster. What comes out are ordinary spaces, not odd characters, so it pastes anywhere and looks the same on every phone.

What happens to the text

A space is inserted between every character of every line, punctuation and digits included. The spaces that were already there stay in place and end up with a space on each side, so the gap between words gets wider: that's what gives the shop-sign effect. Line breaks aren't touched, so a text on three lines stays on three lines.

Emoji and the letters that take up more than one slot in a computer stay whole: they're the case where a badly made cut would produce broken characters, and that doesn't happen here.

Where it isn't a good idea

Spaced text is easy on the eye and awkward for everything else. Anyone using a screen reader hears it spelled out letter by letter, like an acronym; in-app search stops finding it, because «h e l l o» is not the word «hello»; and on a narrow line it wraps wherever it likes, because every letter is now a word of its own. So it's fine on a two-word heading, poor on a whole sentence and terrible on text somebody needs to be able to search for.

Nearby tools

If you want a heading that stands out without spreading, small caps read better: Small caps text. For decorated letters there is Text with special characters and for upside-down ones Upside-down text. If instead your problem is the extra spaces in an ordinary text, the page is Remove extra spaces.