Ambiguous Spaces

[Emma May Smith]

Is there any metric where your results are drastically changed depending on whether or not you use ambiguous spaces? Other than the obvious of course, like word count and the frequency of the space character.

I don't know if drastically is apposite, but affected, yes. The features I want to measure are not words, but parts of words, sometimes in relation to the start and end. And each ambiguous space could potentially do three things:

• Miss a feature at the end of a word, by placing it in the middle of a word.
  
• Miss a feature at the start of a word, by placing it in the middle of a word.
  
• Create a "new" feature in the middle of a word by putting two glyphs adjacent where they shouldn't be.
  

Now, it's not that these issues haven't cropped up before, I just want to assure myself that I've done what I can to eliminate them.