Latex ignores blank space after capital letters

Question

I am having a weird problem. When I compile my documents, Latex drops white spaces between words. This happens only after capitalized letters. For example,

R reports the standard OLS SE, instead of the GMM/2SLS SE.

is typeset in the pdf as

Rreports the standard OLSSE, instead of the GMM/2SLSSE.

I got this PC relatively recently, and this has happened ever since. I am using TeXLive on a Linux Mint machine. I use pdflatex to compile my documents.

UPDATE: So I inspected that behavior a bit further. It turns out that when I initially type the text, latex ignores spaces after capitalized letters as described above. However, when I go back, delete all the spaces and re-enter them, everything works. Does anyone have a clue why that could be?

UPDATE2*: Until now I did not specify the input encoding in the header, i.e. I did NOT use

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

I tried that now, but I can't compile the document anymore. Might that be related to my original problem?

UPDATE3: I did not copy/paste any of the text, I just typed it.

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*I am not sure how things work here, am I supposed to answer questions in the comments or edit my original question?

Answer 1

Your last additions tell me that you mistyped a "NO-BREAK SPACE" instead of a simple space (possibly your keyboard uses Shift-Space for it). If you add

\usepackage[ascii]{inputenc}

to your preamble, such characters will be flagged with errors and it will be easy to find them.