12.3.1 Multiple Spaces

Ordinarily, multiple whitespace characters (space, tab, and newline) are collapsed into a single space.

Occasionally, you may want to produce several consecutive spaces, either for purposes of example (e.g., what your program does with multiple spaces as input), or merely for purposes of appearance in headings or lists. Texinfo supports three commands: @SPACE, @TAB, and @NL, all of which insert a single space into the output. (Here, @SPACE represents an ‘@’ character followed by a space, i.e., ‘@ ’, TAB represents an actual tab character, and @NL represents an ‘@’ character and end-of-line, i.e., when ‘@’ is the last character on a line.)

For example,

Spacey@ @ @ @
example.

produces

Spacey    example.

Other possible uses of @SPACE have been subsumed by @multitable (see Multi-column Tables).

Do not follow any of these commands with braces.

To produce a non-breakable space, see @tie.