Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period • Hacker News Board

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#21

Post by zdxfhgjyt » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 2:58 PM UTC

●------ http://u.ly/73I ------●

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#22

Post by JoeAltmaier » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:02 PM UTC

Amusing: his argument is that authorities say to use one, so use one. He then refutes arguments by others that they learned to use two spaces from their authorities, so they do. "That's wrong!" he says.

There is no argument of value in this article.

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#23

Post by sausagefeet » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:03 PM UTC

spokey wrote: post #6

I'm a couple of years younger than Julian Assange and commonly use two spaces after each sentence, purely out of muscle memory. (I took a "keyboarding" class in 1987 or so using an IBM Selectric typewriter and that's the way I was taught to do it.) I'm not at all surprised that many people still do this. I'm a little surprised that people assert that's a "proper" way to do it or for that matter get worked up enough a…

I think LaTeX does this. Anything more than 1 whitespace is ignored.

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#24

Post by jpr » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:05 PM UTC

I pretty much decided from the title alone that I will begin to use double space just to piss the author off. After reading the article I'm sure that I made the right decision.

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#25

Post by mcantor » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:05 PM UTC

tomlin wrote: post #18

I guess we've solved all the other world problems?

No, the jury is still out on Vim vs. Emacs.

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#26

Post by splat » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:06 PM UTC

sausagefeet wrote: post #23

spokey wrote: post #6

I'm a couple of years younger than Julian Assange and commonly use two spaces after each sentence, purely out of muscle memory. (I took a "keyboarding" class in 1987 or so using an IBM Selectric typewriter and that's the way I was taught to do it.) I'm not at all surprised that many people still do this. I'm a little surprised that people assert that's a "proper" way to do it or for that matter get worked up enough a…

I think LaTeX does this. Anything more than 1 whitespace is ignored.

Yes, LaTeX ignores anything more than one whitespace in the source. It does, however, automatically insert extra space after a period. (Unless you disable it with the ~ symbol, e.g. after the word Mr. or e.g.)

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#27

Post by acconrad » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:06 PM UTC

I envision this becoming an Oatmeal comic.

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#28

Post by zipdog » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:06 PM UTC

From the article:

"Typographers can point to no studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve readability."

...So, there's absolutely no evidence, yet everyone who doesn't agree is 'certainly' wrong...

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#29

Post by rhoeft » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:09 PM UTC

This is a software problem. Programs that display proportional text should recognize one or more spaces after a period as a sentence break and should render appropriately.

Re: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

#30

Post by thomas11 » Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 3:11 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #17

Talk about getting worked up over nothing. Must have had a deadline for a column and nothing better to write about. I use a double space after a period. Always have. I also still use monospaced fonts for almost any composing I do, because I use Emacs whenever possible for that kind of thing. Any normal text layout software (a browser rendering HTML, TeX) is going to ignore whitespace in the source anyway.

In Emacs you also benefit from sentence-level commands that let you move forward or backward by sentence, kill the current sentence etc. Very helpful. These commands recognize sentences by the double space so they don't confuse abbreviations with sentences. See the Emacs manual, chapter Text > Sentences.