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

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

#71

Post by isleyaardvark »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #22

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.

But he also gives the reasons why current authorities say one, and previous authorities say two - all due to the aesthetics and readability of spaces with proportional typesetting versus monospaced type.

The reasons are fairly subjective, but I don't see why so many here are dismissing them simply as pure arguments from authority.

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

#72

Post by nchlswu »

I've always been a single spacer. I understood the purpose in monospace, I otherwise never understood the practice. Almost everyone I've heard only practices it because that's how they learned. That reason wasn't good enough, especially when that was (mostly) rooted in the typewriter, and we're using the modern day computer. Some (justified) reasons are enlightening.

I was always under the impression that in a proper typeset manuscript, sentence spacing should be slightly wider than a standard single space. Typographers make this change when they typeset right? Isn't there an alternate ASCII character for this purpose (entirely not sure, I might be thinking of special characters in certain fonts)

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

#75

Post by cedsav »

It always amazes me how cultural differences find their ways in the oddest little details. I had never heard of the 2 space rule until I moved to the US, and only recently did I realize that the question mark was missing its preceding space... I had to do a bit a research and I'm relieved to read that the ellipsis can still be used to indicate a pause, or a trailing off thought.

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

#77

Post by baby »

stcredzero wrote: post #48
edw519 wrote: post #35

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 galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone-everyone!-said it was proper to use two spaces. What the articles fails to clearly menti…

You're suppose to write the dot after the end of the parenthesis not before !

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

#79

Post by burgerbrain »

stcredzero wrote: post #48
edw519 wrote: post #35

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 galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone-everyone!-said it was proper to use two spaces. What the articles fails to clearly menti…

In the case of the computer programmers, they were most certainly correct. Is the author really so quick to condemn while not realizing that programming is almost always done with monospaced fonts?

Anyway, I never have to worry about this these days anyway. Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;)

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

#80

Post by tommi »

kaffeinecoma wrote: post #45

This is amusingly relevant for me. I had a number of bug reports for my November app Quick Brown Frog ( http://quickbrownfrog.com ) from people complaining of low speed scores, due to their two-space habit (all my source texts are formatted to use a single space, and they're displayed in fixed-width). I considered reformatting all the text to use double-spaces, but then figured that I'd get an equal number of complai…

While somewhat practical and user pleasing, it's wrong. If you can't type what you see, is it really proper typing?

Btw. I've never heard of using two spaces after a sentence. Is this an American habit?

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