14.3.3 Multiple Spaces

Ordinarily, TeX collapses multiple whitespace characters (space, tab, and newline) into a single space. Info output, on the other hand, preserves whitespace as you type it, except for changing a newline into a space; this is why it is important to put two spaces at the end of sentences in Texinfo documents.

Occasionally, you may want to actually insert several consecutive spaces, either for purposes of example (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., ‘@ ’, and TAB and NL represent the tab 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 section @multitable: Multi-column Tables).

Do not follow any of these commands with braces.

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