Tilamerkintä

Tilamerkintä is a term used in Finnish typography and text processing to denote marks or symbols that indicate spacing in a text. The concept covers both visual marks found in manuscripts and the encoding of whitespace in digital texts. In proofreading and editing, tilamerkintä refers to notational devices that show where spaces should appear, be omitted, or be preserved, such as a middle dot, brackets, or marginal notes indicating spacing.

In transcription and linguistic work, tilamerkintä helps signal actual spaces in spoken language data or artificial gaps that are significant for interpretation. In typography, a range of space kinds—space, en space, em space, thin space, hair space—are used to achieve visual rhythm and precision; these can be described as tilamerkintä when specifying the exact type of space to apply.

In digital text, the practical aspect of tilamerkintä is whitespace characters: the regular space (U+0020), the non‑breaking space (U+00A0), and various width spaces (U+2000–U+200A). HTML and other markup languages may collapse multiple spaces unless spacing is preserved with non‑breaking spaces or preformatted blocks; in typesetting and font design, different spaces are chosen to control readability and appearance.

See also: whitespace, non-breaking space, typographic spacing, transcription conventions.