I have been using \hspace and \vspace in my latex documents lately. I was surprised when \hspace{1em} didn't work and found out that I needed to use \hspace*{1em} to force latex to put the space requested.
My question is why does latex sometimes ignores \hspace{1em}
[Tex/LaTex] Question about spacing \hspace and \vspace
spacing
Related Solutions
Use the \frenchspacing command; that makes the sentence spacing single spaced. You can revert it later on in the document via \nonfrenchspacing.
Personally I don't care either way about the spacing after a full stop. I tend not to notice it when I am reading anyway. I do, however, find that with paper drafts I'm editing, it is easier to visually locate the start/end of a sentence with the extra bit of padding.
\vspace only takes effect when LaTeX creates a line break or a new paragraph. I think more technically, \vspace only has effect when LaTeX is in vertical mode. If LaTeX is not currently in vertical mode, LaTeX saves the \vspace until next time it enters vertical mode.
So for example I can write:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Alice was beginning \vspace{2ex} to get very tired of sitting by her sister on
the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped
into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or
conversations in it, ``and what is the use of a book,'' thought
Alice, ``without pictures or conversations?''
\end{document}
which results in
If I want to force the \vspace at the point where I place it, I must start a newline there also:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Alice was beginning \vspace{2ex}\newline to get very tired of sitting by her sister on
the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped
into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or
conversations in it, ``and what is the use of a book,'' thought
Alice, ``without pictures or conversations?''
\end{document}
Alternatively you can start a new paragraph:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Alice was beginning \vspace{2ex}
\noindent
to get very tired of sitting by her sister on
the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped
into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or
conversations in it, ``and what is the use of a book,'' thought
Alice, ``without pictures or conversations?''
\end{document}
These last two examples may look very similar, but the effects could be different if you've set \parskip to a non-zero value, which is generally discouraged.
Best Answer
When TeX breaks a line it discards white space (glue) that would come at the start of a line. This is why you get an inter-word space or a line break between words, not both. So if the
\hspacecomes at the beginning of a line the space gets added by LaTeX but discarded by the TeX paragraph breaker. The*version arranges to put a non-discardable invisible item in fromt of the space so the space is never first thing on the line (even though it looks like it is).\vspaceand\vspace*the same with respect to vertical space discarded at a page break.