Blank Spaces and Carriage Returns in the Input File

LaTeX treats the carriage return at the end of a line as though it were a blank space. Similarly LaTeX treats tab characters as blank spaces. Moreover, LaTeX regards a sequence of blank spaces as though it were a single space, and similarly it will ignore blank spaces at the beginning or end of a line in the input file. Thus, for example, if we type

This is
    a
        silly
  example   of   LaTeX input
with many spaces.


                   This is the beginning
of a new paragraph.

It follows immediately from this that one will obtain the same results whether one types one space or two spaces after a full stop: LaTeX does not distinguish between the two cases.

Any spaces which follow a control sequence will be ignored by LaTeX.

A space following a control sequence may be obtained by preceding the space with a backslash \. For example, the sentence

\LaTeX\ is a very powerful computer typesetting program.

A blank space should not occur in the input file after a left parenthesis or before a right parenthesis.