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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

#131

Post by apotheon »

eliben wrote: post #5
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…

He does link to the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A on the matter: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/OneSpaceorTwo/On... The view at CMOS is that there is no reason for two spaces after a period in published work. [...] So, in our efficient, modern world, I think there is no room for two spaces after a period.

The CMoS is hardly a final authority on the matter. It is just one common style, and is optimized for a particular presentation and publication style. It is also used by teachers to get students to write more words when their requirement is a page count.

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

#132

Post by apotheon »

varikin wrote: post #96
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…

> 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.

That's not "the modern convention of a single space"; that's "a return to the original convention of wider than a normal character width spacing". Note your reference to the width of the space being 1.5em, for instance.

Otherwise, what you say is true.

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

#133

Post by runningdogx »

apl wrote: post #31
haploid wrote: post #4

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?

I do.

If you want to write a parsing program that can delineate sentences, doing so in the face of abbreviations can be difficult. If, for instance, a sentence ends with an abbreviation, and the next sentence starts with a proper noun, an algorithm would detect a run-on sentence and would have to resort to tearing the grammar in the two adjoining sentences apart to figure out where to split them.

If there is a double space between sentences, the problem is reduced to a trivial string splitting operation.

Furthermore, any app that visually displays the text should know that some people use two spaces between sentences, and can trivially correct for this if it's implementing its own fancy typography. HTML already ignores multiple contiguous 0x20 spaces. Any text rendering algorithm fancy enough to implement good typography can likewise simply ignore the double space.

Double spaces between sentences have no mandatory effect on visual layout since layout algorithms can ignore the extra space, However, it can have a significant effect on the speed, if not accuracy, of text parsing algorithms.

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

#134

Post by apotheon »

reduxredacted wrote: post #91
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 r…

If you liked that -- I wonder if you would also like the longer version:

http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57

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

#135

Post by apotheon »

flatline wrote: post #57
3pt14159 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does HN truncate double spaces? Testing this now. Otherwise I'm only picking up one space after your sentences. Edit: Looks like it does. Yay PG! Edit2: Looks like I forgot some basics of HTML. My 14 year old self would be very disappointed.

The HTML rendering engine in your browser actually consolidates each block of white space into a single visible space character. If you view source, there are two spaces there. So, there's a good reason not to use two spaces, as the web will only show the one.

That's not a good reason to use two spaces -- that's a good reason for people who think one space is "the standard" to stop haranguing people who use more than one character width to separate sentences when typing.

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

#136

Post by apotheon »

haberman wrote: post #102
flatline wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HTML rendering engine in your browser actually consolidates each block of white space into a single visible space character. If you view source, there are two spaces there. So, there's a good reason not to use two spaces, as the web will only show the one.

> The HTML rendering engine in your browser actually consolidates each block of white space into a single visible space character. I don't believe that's true when the browser decides to break the line between the two spaces -- see: http://i.imgur.com/MksV7.png (which I took from http://www.jeanhsu.com/?p=229 ) So I guess you could argue that putting two spaces in HTML is strictly a negative: it does nothing, except…

There's something kooky going on with that page. I think the CMS used for that site must be substituting one type of space character with another in Unicode, or something like that, so that the browser does not "know" how to collapse the two whitespace characters into a single whitespace character.

When I copy the two whitespace characters between sentences there into separate text files that contain nothing but those whitespace characters, then `diff a.txt b.txt`, the result is that they differ, so there is definitely some difference between the two types of whitespace characters used between sentences.

I've written a text formatting tool designed to preserve multiple whitespace instances on the Web. It used ` ` for the first of every pair of standard single space characters. Apparently, this CMS is doing something similar, but even tricker because it doesn't show up in the source as an HTML entity, and perhaps less well thought-out because for some reason the nonbreaking version space character used is the second of the two (which results in weird ghost-spaces at the beginnings of lines sometimes, as you discovered).

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

#137

Post by wrs »

I set lead type as a hobby, and I can tell you the entire concept of a "space character" does not exist in typesetting. Space is not made of characters, it's made of space (in metal, it's made of tiny shims of copper, brass, or lead).

Any use of the space bar in a computer typesetting context is just a hint to some algorithm regarding how much space you want put between the characters on either side. TeX doesn't put "1.5 spaces" between sentences; it puts glue that is slightly stretchier than the glue it puts between words.

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

#138

Post by xentronium »

Corrado wrote: post #56
3pt14159 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does HN truncate double spaces? Testing this now. Otherwise I'm only picking up one space after your sentences. Edit: Looks like it does. Yay PG! Edit2: Looks like I forgot some basics of HTML. My 14 year old self would be very disappointed.

Actually, its your browser that renders multiple spaces as a single space. If you want multiple spaces in your HTML you have to use the non-breakable space tag " ".

I believe there is      unbreakable space character you could use for that purpose.

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

#139

Post by apotheon »

bane wrote: post #41
haploid wrote: post #4

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.

You haven't given a reason for double spacing either (I like to triple space to make extra sure).

Try these reasons for two-space sentence separation (and against the Slate single-space argument):

http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57

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

#140

Post by apotheon »

stcredzero wrote: post #51
larrik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN comments don't respect whitespace as typed when displaying them. (' ' one space vs. ' ' two spaces) An effect of HTML, I'm sure. When I edit the post, the 2 spaces between the second set of quotes is indeed still there.

For the sake of consistency, HN should render -- as an actual dash.

. . . except in code.
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