For BricsCAD and AutoCAD, the use of the space bar corresponds to the Enter key. Why would you want to use a font where spaces are clearly visible? To see what you are going to paste on the command line of your CAD program of course!

The principle

You can type a number of commands in a word processor and then copy and paste them on the command line.

The challenge is to ensure that everything is correctly selected during copying – near spaces at the end you have to be careful, because every space is an enter.

An paste example where each underscore is a space:

• A circle with a radius of 1: circle_0,0_1_
• A line from 0,0 to 1,1: line_0,0_1,1__

Note that there are two spaces at the end of the last example.

A font with visible spaces

How nice would it be if there were a font with visible spaces?

I searched and did not find it.

So let’s make it! Fontforge is heated up and character 0020 (space) will be hit by the forging hammer. The default font is FreeMono. During editing, the capital S and P are placed together as SP and then scaled to 35%, after the anchor points have been removed. Then a TTF was created with the name FreeMonoSp.ttf

FreeMonoSp.ttf is here: http://media.nedcad.nl/support/

Create a style in LibreOffice. And it works!

This way a problem has been solved in a very nice way. However …

The minuses

However, many people are not used to receiving LibreOffice documents. And they also have to install the font with the spaces. One more reason to get started with this package!

Everything looks very good in PDF. But copying does not work well. Almost all PDF readers see extra spaces after a text as an error and thus delete the spaces! A big bug that you can not work around.

So you have to think every time: copy the text, paste the text and do not forget to add the unselected spaces.

Yet useful!

Despite the minuses, this font clearly shows exactly what needs to be pasted on the command line. This makes this font a great addition to the documentation of CAD programs such as BricsCAD.

Addendum

The license is inherited from FreeFont and is GPL. See https://github.com/opensourcedesign/fonts/blob/master/gnu-freefont_freemono/COPYING

Apparently there are more applications for fonts with visible spaces, such as log-in screens of computers.