> We need a collective name for the set of spacing characters. "space-like" ?
I've given this some thought today and also polled Twitter for some feedback. What I came up with was "spacing character(s)". If we want to be purely academic, the definition (from Merriam-Webster) fits extremely well:
>> the act of providing with spaces or placing at intervals
We are talking about the act of spacing visible characters & words for the purpose of placing them at intervals (either setting them apart in a line or organizing them on separate lines). I don't think we should try to invent a word when there's already one available with a suitable definition.
Speaking of Unicode, there *is* a property for this group of characters. The name of that group is "Space". Try /\p{Space}/ with any regular _expression_ engine that supports Unicode properties to see what it matches. However, I think the concern about this term being too easily confused with the space character (\u0020) from ASCII / Basic Latin is valid.
One thing we will need to be careful about, though, is that AsciiDoc doesn't support *all* spacing characters. So we'll just need to emphasize that in our definition / usage.
Best Regards,
-Dan
