I am unable to respond to the thread: http://forums.macnn.com/82/applicati...edit-document/

because vBulletin gives me an error message stating the thread is too old to bump, and that I must create a new thread.

So I am doing that here.

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

what is a mistyped space? A space is a space.

Alright, so I have gotten around to capturing this very weird "1 mistyped space per 1000 spaces" phenomenon. Mac OS X 10.5.8 iMac G5. The below text contains a strange space character that doesn't register as the standard ASCII space character:

"I still haven't heard from you, what happened to our "meeting up" this past March?"

Immediately to the left of the "to" is this strange character that looks like a square, and inside it, has the text
00
10

That's just what I see when I type it in my post text box. Maybe if you quote this post you can see it.

I cannot seem to attach the example document, because your vBulletin settings seem to forbid attachments.

Therefore, this is the file that I had intended to attach. Download it, and you will see this strange space in the same identified location as stated above:
http://home.gwi.net/~rdf/WeirdSpace.rtf

[dedalus]

That’s Unicode character 0001 (UTF8 001). It doesn’t have a name, and according to Character Palette, the only fonts that contain it are Hiragino and VT100. I don’t see that square with the numbers in it, it looks exactly like a standard space from here.

[Hal Itosis]

Originally Posted by dedalus 

That’s Unicode character 0001 (UTF8 001). It doesn’t have a name, and according to Character Palette, the only fonts that contain it are Hiragino and VT100. I don’t see that square with the numbers in it, it looks exactly like a standard space from here.

It appears to be hex "0010" (or octal 020), not 0001.

Code:
OCT  HEX   SYM  DESCRIPTION                KEY SEQUENCE
020  0x10  DLE  data link escape         control p (^P)

Using copy 'n' paste (of happened to our) and checking in terminal confirmed that...

Code:
$ od -cb Untitled
0000000    h   a   p   p   e   n   e   d     020   t   o       o   u   r
          150 141 160 160 145 156 145 144 040 020 164 157 040 157 165 162
0000020

That control character itself doesn't produce an actual "space"... there just happens to be a space next to it in the text.

[Oisín]

It’s called “data link escape (DLE)”, and according to Wikipedia, its function is to:

Cause the following octets to be interpreted as raw data, not as control codes or graphic characters. Returning to normal usage would be implementation dependent.

… whatever exactly that would mean, when the character shows up in regular, formatted HTML text …

[ghporter]

That means "we have no idea how it is going to be interpreted." In the old teletype days, characters like DLE were important for managing, switching, and routing teletype messages. Now, with the use of ASCII data sort of trivialized by HTML and the Web, there's no specific required implementation of characters like DLS, ACK, NAK, and the ever popular ETX.

[dedalus]

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis 

It appears to be hex "0010" (or octal 020), not 0001.
[…]
That control character itself doesn't produce an actual "space"... there just happens to be a space next to it in the text.

:/
Character Palette seems to disagree.

[Oisín]

^ That’s kind of odd, ’cause by your exact procedure (copy the text into TextEdit, highlighting the odd character, opening the character palette, and choosing “Show Character Selected in Application”), I get 0010 as well.

[ghporter]

Is the "placekeeper" character actually supposed to indicate the binary value of a non-printing character?

[dedalus]

Must be my settings. I just did the same thing with TextWrangler, and there I did get 0010:



Weird.

I'm using a Logitech G11 keyboard and 10.5.8, but this seems to be a problem for all 10.5.x.

Anyone know why a "fake space" like the data escape character (never heard of it before) might be typed in place of a standard ("normal") space when I use the spacebar? Is this a common OS X bug or a problem with using a Logitech keyboard?