: Which secondary whitespace character should I use for my seven-segment font? Background Information I'm working on creating a semi-monospaced font that will mimic a seven-segment display. There are

@Si6392903

My inclination would be to substitute a different character for the colon--perhaps a semicolon. Using a semicolon would mean that provided it was the same width as the colon, blinking by toggling between the two would not disturb the placement of other elements. Things would only really appear "correct" in a font where the appearance of the colon was suitable for a "disabled" colon, but that wouldn't necessarily be the same thing as blank. One might, for example, want a font where active segments are shown solid and inactive ones as outlines. In such a font, a semicolon would show up as two outlined dots.

An additional advantage of a semicolon is that with most fonts, an animation formed by cycling between a colon and semicolon would appear as a colon with a blinking tail. Not ideal, but probably the best that can be achieved without a whitespace character whose width is specified to be the same as a colon--something most fonts don't have.

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@Michele215

A thin space should be "a fifth of an em (or sometimes a sixth)". The punctuation glyph is just slightly over four times the width of the digit glyphs, so that character does not make sense semantically.

Since this character is being used as a placeholder for punctuation, it appears the most semantically appropriate character to use is the Punctuation Space (U+2008).


space equal to narrow punctuation of a font


Another whitespace character that should be considered for implementation is a Figure Space (U+2007):


space equal to tabular width of a font

this is equivalent to the digit width of fonts with fixed-width digits


Though I wouldn't presume that anyone would expect a seven-segment font to include this, it is nice to include it as a fallback.

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