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In the screenshot of TextMate below, I turned on "Show Invisibles." What's the whitespace character on the third line?

Text I imported from somewhere has these dot spaces, and I'm trying to figure out what they are.

screenshot

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These are non-breaking spaces.

In contrast to normal spaces, they won't cause a line break. For example, you may want to add one between "OS" and "X" when you write "OS X". In HTML, they're created through the   character reference, but you can type them on a Mac by pressing ⌥-Space.

To inspect them, just copy them to Character Viewer's search box (press ⌥⌘T):

Whether you want them or not depends on your application. Some compilers might chocke on these non-ASCII characters, for example. It's generally better to replace them with normal spaces unless you really need them.

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  • Thanks @slhck. That was it-- they were ignored by pdflatex and replacing them with normal spaces fixed the problem.
    – Grnbeagle
    Mar 26, 2012 at 0:38
  • I know what you mean! Had these problems with LaTeX myself, resulting in weird errors.
    – slhck
    Mar 26, 2012 at 5:34

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