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I couldn't find any authoritative references about this which are available on public internet.

the code is 0x2008.

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  • What does French have to do with anything? – Ryan Jun 10 '15 at 20:09
  • What is "the Unicode punctuation character"? There are lots of them. – Jongware Jun 10 '15 at 20:11
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    You should use the correct punctuation mark, always, in any language. If that requires the use of Unicode to achieve then do it. I don't know of a single rule in ANY language that says to use an incorrect punctuation mark. Can you show me one? – Ryan Jun 10 '15 at 20:45
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    I believe that's the thin non-breaking space used in "classic" French typography. They have spaces before punctuation marks like ! but these are thinner than usual and non-breaking to avoid risking having a line start with ! or similar. There's some info about it here - french.stackexchange.com/questions/46/… – user56reinstatemonica8 Jun 10 '15 at 21:53
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    I think you need to step back and read what the SE model is about. I would love to see more typography questions but, as it sits, I do not think you understand our site and are just randomly asking questions trying to make the argument that "its off-topic here" when it's really you aren't asking questions that can be answered or asking questions that are unclear of the intent so become hard to answer. – DᴀʀᴛʜVᴀᴅᴇʀ Jun 11 '15 at 13:08
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It's pretty subjective once you get into different widths of spaces down to such minute details. I don't believe you'll find a specific usage because one does not exist.

The main difference among other space characters is their width. U+2000..U+2006 are standard quad widths used in typography. U+2007 FIGURE SPACE has a fixed width, known as tabular width, which is the same as digits used in tables. U+2008 PUNCTUATION SPACE is a space defined to be the same width as a period. U+2009 THIN SPACE and U+200A HAIR SPACE are successively smaller-width spaces used for narrow word gaps and for justification of type. The fixed-width space characters (U+2000..U+200A) are derviced from conventional (hot lead) typography. Algorithmic kerning and justification in computerized typography do not use these characters. However, where they are used (for example, in typesetting mathematical formulae), their width is generally font-specific, and they typically do not expand during justification. The exception is U+2009 THIN SPACE, which sometimes gets adjusted.

Source: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode7.0.0/ch06.pdf

Again it makes no difference if its in French. The only exception are the non-breaking spaces used to distinguish words in languages that don't generally have spaces between words.

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Based on what you're asking I would use unicode values when entering data or content into a database and you are offering an API or someone needs to pull data from the API. Actually rendered characters can cause issues over time or depending on how the code is written can cause catastrophic effects to the rendered output.

Another reason you would use unicode is if your font doesn't actually have the character present and the browser would still be able to render the value correctly based on the unicode.

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