Writing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
"We have 31in of whatever and 4m of whatever etc..."
Should there be a space between the number and the units? Should the units be in italics or normal font? When do the units go in italics?
Then suppose you have a bullet point list with numbers:
So & so: 4m.
So & so: 31in.
Do rules apply differently here?
For example, NIST has detailed notes on the typeface for variables and units
and they agree with the IEEE style manual
but Google's Developer Style Manual doesn't discuss the topic at all, through the details regarding spacing and abbreviations and nomenclature agree with the two previous cited examples.
The most important thing is to be consistent. If this is for in house documentation or a student project the selecting a style guide and following it is the best practice.
The style guides I reviewed all required a space between the units and the numeric value. And if the values are bullet listed, there is no reason for that to change the formatting, unless a style guide defines that as the expected pattern.
