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

#171

Post by bgmccollum » Sat, Jan 15, 2011, 2:26 AM UTC

Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

Section 2.1.4 – Use a single word space between sentences.

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. As a general rule, no more than a single space is required after a period, colon or any other mark of punctuation.

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

#172

Post by fanf2 » Sat, Jan 15, 2011, 12:33 PM UTC

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…

An em is the width of an upper-case M. If you look at printed text you'll see that spaces are much narrower, in fact narrower than ens - compare a space with an en dash.

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

#173

Post by cgray4 » Sat, Jan 15, 2011, 10:17 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #142

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…

Interesting data point when a comment on a forum so clearly surpasses an article written by a professional writer for an online publication. This, ultimately, is why journalism is losing. The stuff the pros write is no better than the stuff other people write for free in blog posts and comments on forums. Which is why paywalls don't work. The stuff behind them isn't better enough that readers will pay to get at it.

You must be careful when comparing the worst to the best. Farhad has been a crummy technology writer since he was at Salon, and this is basically the only site on which I read comments. I would much rather read a great story by a great journalist than any comment by the average Youtube commenter.

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

#174

Post by lostbit » Mon, Jan 17, 2011, 4:13 AM UTC

For me, the second space after the period is a wasted byte. The same applies for the just one space after the period if you are actually moving to the next paragraph (just a CR+LF) is enough (more than enough in Unix).

But what I really dislike is the preceeding space before the question mark. That really messes up my brain sentence parser (and many word processos too).