This template alternates HTML and Unicode acceptable variations of ways to declaring spaces, forcing browsers to recognize each in turn, when their rendering would normally compact and eliminate successive spaces. In short, they force padding within, before, or after a field which includes them in a line (which in practice, is usually within a wikitable, to force alignments of long and short words, such as month names, etc.)

{{space}} (shortcut redirect: {{s}}) can be used inline to create alignment between adjacent text lines, or to space out titles, etc. Like {{indent}}, it takes a numeric argument nn (up to 30) after the pipe and provides that many consecutive spaces. Indent differs only in that it automatically begins a newline, then spaces over nn spaces.

{{indent|2}}, {{space|7}}, etc.

The templates space and indent are limited to adding 30 spaces, and have a cost in pre-expansion template size, because their logic contains 30 sets of the counted spaces.

Better results, for indenting large sections, can frequently be gained by using {{nowrap}} and/or the HTML formatting <div style="margin-left: XXem;">...<div>, where "XX" is a numeric em value. Since browser design philosophy is to trim consecutive spaces, check results also in different zoom settings, and on more than one browser if possible. One repeat offender is the Internet Explorer browser family.

  • {{Sp}} — produces a single (breakable) space, for use in template substitution
  • {{Pad}} for indenting a single line