FranklyIprefertheancienttraditionofusingneitherpunctuationnorspacesCapitalizationisoptional
The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#42FranklyIprefertheancienttraditionofusingneitherpunctuationnorspacesCapitalizationisoptional
Don't forget the
.nodehportsuob
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#43Emacs has forward/backward-sentence (alt-e/alt-a) commands, but you have to have two spaces after a period for it to know where sentences begin/end.
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#44Is this just an American thing? I was educated in the UK and it never once came up (we use a single space), nor have I heard of it anywhere except online conversations with Americans.
I've come across it in the UK. I remember a friend's mother, born in ~1940, insisting on it.
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#45I'm surprised the article did not show the difference. Here it is: 1 space after period === I’ve written before about the effect of color gradients on reading, and how it goes against the findings of science that our words should be in a single color, usually black and usually on a near-white background, and usually presented in lines of a certain length. This is all a matter of tradition and style, not optimal infor…
Yes, this does need to be at presentation time. In monospace, this may make sense, but that's not how text layout works. A space is dynamically sized.
Granted, there are overloading issues, but we have had decades to refine text layout engines to account for this. Major text layout systems, including those used in publishing, need to be able to dynamically adjust spacing based upon context. Software such as InDesign does this, and it is a standard part of workflow to replace all double-spaces with single-spaces.
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Personally I think the extra space does improve readability. In the way that I read, I find that two spaces here highlights the first word(s) of the sentence, and that makes it much slower for me to parse the meaning of the sentence as a whole. "I've written before about", "This", "This", "It's why I thought", "I", "When I found" - usually I want to skip over these words and get to the meaning: not have them be ide…
I find it allows my eyes to easily find the beginning of the next sentence which allows me to read faster, since I can scan information in sentence-long chunks, then pause briefly to process the meaning before scanning the next sentence.
I'd toyed with CSS first-child, first-line, and first-letter classesva ways back ... and foud that especially for '"cards-type" formats, these made finding and distinguishing new posts far clearer.
The style is (largely) incorporated in https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius. An ello example with screenshots; https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/QGKKdiuqUw6O7ROl-V3uJA
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#47Two spaces should be a good rule for plain text formats, like Markdown or reStructuredText -- this way the parser can identify sentences and recognize the punctuation that ends an abbreviation vs the one that ends a sentence. (It's not that any parser is doing this currently, as far as I know.)
How would you handle the case in which a sentence ends with an abbreviation?
Two spaces distinguish sentences.
The abbreviation ends a sentence. It gets two spaces.
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#48FranklyIprefertheancienttraditionofusingneitherpunctuationnorspacesCapitalizationisoptional
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#49Is this just an American thing? I was educated in the UK and it never once came up (we use a single space), nor have I heard of it anywhere except online conversations with Americans.
The only time I got told to use two spaces was by my dad. Literally everywhere else, it was single space. In school, two spaces was considered bad grammar and would get marked in red ink.
Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
#50Random facts. French puts a half-space before any punctuation mark with two parts:
https://crowdagger.github.io/textes/articles/heuristique.htm...
Although in Quebec they only do it before colons:
https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tcdnstyl-chap?lang=eng&let...
German used to put spaces before punctuation, now doesn't, and some guy on Usenet came up with a term for it: