Nonprinting

Nonprinting refers to elements in digital text or document formatting that do not appear as visible characters in the final printed or rendered output. In typography and word processing, nonprinting characters, also called formatting marks, indicate structure and formatting without producing glyphs themselves. Common examples include spaces, tabs, paragraph marks, line breaks, page breaks, and soft hyphens. Some systems also support invisible markers such as zero-width spaces or non-breaking spaces that influence line breaks and word wrapping without adding visible ink. Users can typically toggle the display of these marks to aid editing or troubleshooting layout.

In computing, nonprinting characters often refer to control characters in ASCII or Unicode, such as the newline, carriage return, tab, and other C0/C1 controls. These characters have functional roles for devices or text processing but are not meant to be displayed directly. Programs may escape or render them specially to preserve text semantics or for debugging.

In the printing industry, nonprinting may also describe parts of a page outside the printable area, such as margins or bleed regions, which are not intended to be printed but are important in layout planning.

Handling nonprinting characters correctly is essential for reliable text processing, searching, and formatting. Different software treats them differently, with some preserving them during copy/paste and others collapsing whitespace or removing control characters on import.