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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

#91

Post by reduxredacted »

apotheon wrote: post #2

He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong. Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typespaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves…

Well put. I learned to type on an old fashioned IBM typewriter when I was in middle school. We were taught the two spaces after a period rule and that's so burned into my mind that it takes effort to use a single space after a period.

This really felt like a two page rant over something that very few people in the world even notice when reading, and even fewer would care. On the other-hand, unlearning the two-space rule for someone who touch types fast enough to transcribe most people's speaking speed in real-time is going to take an enormous amount of effort.

Even if I agreed with the statements presented in the article I didn't find anything compelling enough to justify the effort of retraining my fingers.

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

#93

Post by jeromec »

apotheon wrote: post #2

He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong. Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typespaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves…

Another writing convention I read long ago which grew out of typewriter limitation is placing a comma or period within quotation marks when not part of the quotation as in:

I'm a fully qualified "hacker."

The period is not part of the quotation, but American writing style suggests it should still go within the quotation marks. America appears to be the only English speaking country to have this writing style; it's not that way in Britain, for example. I read this was due to something like ink splotching (or possibly it was jamming up of keys, which apparently gave us the non-optimum QWERTY layout) from where the typewriter would strike the page on mechanical typewriters when typing quickly if leaving the punctuation outside of the quotation marks as logic would dictate. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that, but I generally rebel and use the British style when writing, especially in informal situations like posting online comments.

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

#94

Post by mrinterweb »

I was taught to use two spaces.   Apparently there was a reformation of the the double space rule sometime thereafter.    I would expect to be informed about such an important change in English grammar through a high exposure world-wide public announcement campaign. Considering that the use of double spaces separating sentences can provoke such ridicule, there really needs to be a global effort to educate all English speaking citizens of Earth.     Perhaps even training centers could be erected where people could be taught this new important change to the language.       These centers could perhaps even treat those who have been subject to the extreme psychological trauma of the public ridicule caused by the misuse of the space.

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

#95

Post by mmaunder »

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)

Can't believe he managed to wrench 2000 words out of that subject.

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

#96

Post by varikin »

apotheon wrote: post #2

He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong. Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typespaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves…

Actually, the modern convention of a single space is not due to saving space.† A proportional computer font is kerned in such a way that the space after a period is wider then between words. For example, a standard space is 1em‡, but the space after the period is kerned to give a width of 1.5em‡‡. A typewriter on the other hand only has a single 1em space, so either use 1 space or 2. Also, I read once that they used 2 spaces on a typewriter to reinforce the ending of the sentence in case the period did not strike properly.

† Though newspapers are famous for tricks like this such as the missing oxford comma according the AP Stylebook, and I wouldn't put it past the newspapers to have done single spaces years ago for this reason. There are several differences between AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style to account for saving space.

‡ An em is the width of the lowercase m in the font.

‡‡ 1.5em isn't a hard and fast rule. The rule is wider than an em and less than 2 em's. It could be 1 1/3 is common as well. In reality, a designer spends agonizing amounts of adjusting the kerning on a font til it looks how they want.

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

#97

Post by aidenn0 »

tjr wrote: post #16

Years ago, working on GNU documentation, RMS instructed me to use two spaces. The documents were processed into HTML, TeX, Texinfo, and plain text, the former two of which auto-collapsed two spaces into one, and the latter two of which were often viewed with a monospace font, thus benefiting from the extra space. I carried this practice over into the rest of my writing, although recently I have noticed that some web…

The default setup for any TeX Ive used will convert a space after a period to 1.5 spaces, which is what I prefer. You can of course change this.

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

#98

Post by cincinnatus »

What a useless pedantic article, how did this get to the top of the HN front page?

I often type two spaces because it was drilled into me when I learned touch typing at 14 years of age. Very hard to unlearn that. Unusually I also had a Dad who was a layout designer, so I knew a lot about typography including that you only use a single space when laying type. Still f'ing hard to overcome the double space which is done completely reflexively by fast touch typists.

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

#99

Post by colomon »

handelaar wrote: post #70

Why you should always, always use two spaces after a full-stop (when writing for online use): 1. Because it remains correct in monospace, and 2. Because no HTML rendering engine displays the second one anyway. This man's rather ill-informed about the 'tech' part of his 'tech column' gig.

Not just that -- doesn't he give the strong impression he manually changes each instance of a double space he runs into?

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

#100

Post by haberman »

I've used two spaces for a while now. It just feels right that sentences have more space between them than "Mr." has after it.

But there's one annoying, persistent browser bug that cramps my style. If a line wraps after the first of two spaces, the second space will be on the next line, which looks terrible: http://i.imgur.com/MksV7.png

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