What's the easiest way to insert a "thin space"?

[Malcolm Patterson]

Thin spaces are used to separate a footnote from the preceding text unless
there's intervening punctuation, to separate double and single quotes, with
the degree symbol, in equations, and in a few other instances.

Kerning works, but seems tedious.

If you can answer that, you can probably tell me whether a non-breaking
space is a "thick space" (1/3 em) or not.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You can insert a "thin space" using 2009, Alt+X, but note that this
character is not present in all fonts. Arial Unicode MS contains it, along
with quite a few other spacing variations in the same character subset
(General Punctuation). If you insert it in a run of some other font (Times
New Roman, for example), it will be inserted as MS Mincho.

Judging by display only, it would appear that a nonbreaking space is between
1/4 and 1/3 em. You could test this by typing a pipe character (|), an em
dash (or em space), and another pipe on one line, and then, on the line
immediately below, a pipe, three or four nonbreaking spaces, and another
pipe.

 

[Klaus Linke]

You can insert a "thin space" using 2009, Alt+X

.... or a "six-per-em-space" using 2006, Alt+X.

I think as long you have any big Unicode font installed, Word will switch
fonts automatically, and you don't have to worry about it much ... though
the additional font(s) do clutter up the "styles and formatting" pane a bit.

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The really annoying thing is that Word uses MS Mincho, with results that can
be unpredictable and very annoying.