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Well, obviously underscores won't do. Not only could they be
mistaken for real underscores, but they all merge together so
they're impossible to count.
Back in the old days -- wazzit when I was studying COBOL??? --
we used a b with a slash through it to indicate a space. And
in many fonts, blank character positions are indicated by
empty square boxes. I'd pick a character that you're sure
will not appear anywhere else in the docs -- a square wingding
or a circle and slash -- and call that a blank space. They'll
be easy to count and not easily confused. Depending on your
layout, you could footnote or otherwise reference some sort of
legend material.
HTH!
-Sue Gallagher
sgallagher -at- akonix -dot- com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John J. Gardiner [mailto:john -at- johngardiner -dot- com]
> I am developing docs that include examples of code. These
> code snippets
> include very important spaces among other characters. The number of
> successive spaces is important too. My client has asked that
> I find a means
> to indicate that a specific number spaces exist in the code
> via some sort
> of symbol, such as an underscore. So an example of code would
> look like
> this in the doc:
>
> codecode_code__code___
>
> Obviously, users would need to know that the underscore is
> not used in the
> code, but simply represents a space. Does anyone have any
> suggestions of
> how to handle this effectively in docs?
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