When I write in Chinese, I don’t put spaces between Chinese characters and English words or numbers.
I learned this while writing my book. It turns out editors don’t want you adding those spaces by hand. They adjust everything at once later, during typesetting.
That made total sense to me.
Spacing is a typesetting problem, not a writing problem.
What felt weird was adding spaces by hand, or with AI, every time I wrote a post.
And it often led to inconsistencies. I’d miss a space or two without noticing.
Let CSS handle it
No post on this blog has extra spaces between Chinese and English or numbers. Instead, CSS adds the spacing automatically.
I think it looks better that way, too. The gap isn’t as wide as a full space. It’s just right.
The downside: when you read my blog in an RSS reader, there’s still no gap, so the reading experience is a little worse.
Let the reader handle it
Just last week, the NetNewsWire pull request I submitted in April finally got merged.
Update to the latest version, and when you read this site’s RSS in NetNewsWire, Chinese and English get spaced out too.
Beautiful.
Join me, and stop adding spaces by hand when you write Chinese.
