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.

The things a reader sees as a single character stay whole even when the computer stores them as several pieces: flags, composed emoji (families, skin tones) and letters with a separately written accent. Cutting them in the middle would produce two half flags or an accent hanging on a space, 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.

The seven special-character pages share the same engine and the same table of styles, so the same text, in the same style, comes out identical on all of them. The other six are Fancy fonts for bio, Fancy text generator, Small caps text, Upside down text, Alternating case and Leet speak translator.