If you want to print elements with N spaces between them, you can use printf:
a="foo"
b="somestring"
c="bar"
# Print each argument with three spaces between them
printf "%s " "$a" "$b" "$c"
# Print a line feed afterwards
printf "\n"
This results in:
foo somestring bar
otherdata foo bar
You can also use the format %-12s
to pad each element to 12 character:
# Pad each field to 12 characters
printf "%-12s" "$a" "$b" "$c"
printf "\n"
Resulting in:
foo somestring bar
otherdata foo bar