\ ¶This section refers to the command consisting of two characters, a backslash followed by a space. Synopsis:
\
Produce a space. By default it produces white space of length 3.33333pt plus 1.66666pt minus 1.11111pt.
When you type one or more blanks between words, LaTeX produces whitespace that is different than an explicit space. This illustrates:
\begin{tabular}{rl}
One blank:& makes some space \\
Three blanks:& in a row \\
Three spaces:&\ \ \ in a row \\
\end{tabular}
On the first line LaTeX puts some space after the colon. On the
second line LaTeX collapses the three blanks to output one
whitespace, so you end with the same space after the colon as in the
first line. LaTeX would similarly collapse them to a single
whitespace if one, two or all of the three blanks were replaced by a
tab, or by a newline. However, the bottom line asks for three spaces so
the white area is wider. That is, the backslash-space command creates a
fixed amount of horizontal space. (Note that you can define a
horizontal space of any width at all with \hspace;
see \hspace.)
The backslash-space command has two main uses. It is often used after
control sequences to keep them from gobbling the blank that follows, as
after \TeX in \TeX\ (or \LaTeX). (But using curly braces
has the advantage of still working whether the next character is a blank
or any other non-letter, as in \TeX{} (or \LaTeX{}) in which
{} can be added after \LaTeX as well as after
\TeX.) The other common use is that it marks a period as ending
an abbreviation instead of ending a sentence, as in Prof.\ Smith
or Jones et al.\ (1993) (see \@).
Under normal circumstances, \TAB and \NEWLINE
are equivalent to backslash-space, \ .
In order to allow source code indentation, under normal circumstances, TeX ignores leading blanks in a line. So the following prints ‘one word’:
one word
where the white space between ‘one’ and ‘word’ is produced by the newline after ‘one’, not by the space before ‘word’.