41–50 of 174 posts
It seems that the reason it's wrong is that typographers say it is. The author has not given an actual reason , other than appeal to authority. I will continue to double-space until I'm dead.
It seems that the reason it's wrong is that typographers say it is. The author has not given an actual reason , other than appeal to authority. I will continue to double-space until I'm dead.
> I will continue to double-space until I'm dead. Do you have a reason for doing so?
It's also to some extent simply out of habit. But even if my only reason was because Miss Millie in the 3rd grade told me to( another appeal to authority ), I'm not writing desperate screeds admonishing everyone about being bad people because they aren't listening to Miss Millie.
signed,
-a die hard two spacer
I considered reformatting all the text to use double-spaces, but then figured that I'd get an equal number of complaints from the single-spacers (little-endians?)
In the end I changed the code to ignore the double space if received as input. No complaints after that. :-)
Of course, the software has to understand what it is that it is typesetting, and the font needs to define spacing in such a way that the typesetting software can do things as intended, so the specification for authors here is really defined by the software. If it wants two spaces after a period, then give it two. If it wants one, then give it one.
I suspect that most software expects one.
In a fully pedantic world, we'd have different unicode code points for "gap between word", "gap after sentence", and presumably others to cover every situation, and the font designer would then have full control.
Articles with the word "never" in the title: Beware their myopia, lack of vision, and narrow-mindedness. Articles with the word "ever" in the title: Beware their gross generalizations, lack of gray area, and hasty conclusions. Articles with both the words "never" and "ever" in the title: Never, ever read them. (oops)
What the articles fails to clearly mention, is that many style manuals used in high schools in the 80's were steeped in the monospaced technology of the time and taught two spaces as correct.
Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach.
This is one of the few mentions in this article of this fact -- that two-spacing was once dogma. This makes me seriously doubt the objectivity of this article. (Actually, I don't think this article is attempting any degree of objectivity at all.)
HN confuses this issue, since we type our comments monospaced, but they are displayed proportional. (Which is why I also double-dash!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems that the reason it's wrong is that typographers say it is.[single space]The author has not given an actual reason, other than appeal to authority.
Right Click -> Inspect says it's two spaces. HTML ignores extra whitespace.
It's settled, then. :)
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.