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The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

#51

Post by nerdponx »

falcolas wrote: post #13
xiwenc wrote: post #5

I'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…

Part of the problem is that the period is overloaded. Massively overloaded. And not in a BNF (or other regular syntax) style that makes sentence breaks mechanically identifiable. Even a period-space-capital method is far from foolproof, Mr. Anderson.

This raises an interesting consideration for typesetting engines like TeX. Maybe we should only use the full stop character for sentence breaks, and to typeset initialisms use a directive like \initials{USA}. This also allows the style/template to determine whether (or not) to intercalate the initials with full stop characters when typesetting the document.

Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

#52

Post by gnabgib »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #37

Is 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.

It is not, also educated in the UK and two spaces were required. HTML makes it hard to double space, and we get a lot of reading material via the web now, so maybe this is why single space is the world standard.

It is harder to read, but other aspects contribute here too (overly wide or narrow columns, bad contrast, bad font choice, late-bound style/fonts/js/ads that move what you're reading, dancing hamsters)

Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

#54

Post by layer8 »

hprotagonist wrote: post #15
layer8 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same in source documentation, to limit the portion that has to be reformatted when changing something in the middle.

i’d have trouble keeping line length limits in docstrings.

It doesn't mean that a sentence can't contain line breaks. It means that there's a line break after each sentence. This causes paragraph reformatting (for maintaining line length) to be restricted to the current sentence, instead of also affecting the following sentences.

Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

#55

Post by marcus_holmes »

gnabgib wrote: post #52
marcus_holmes wrote: post #37

Is 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.

It is not, also educated in the UK and two spaces were required. HTML makes it hard to double space, and we get a lot of reading material via the web now, so maybe this is why single space is the world standard. It is harder to read, but other aspects contribute here too (overly wide or narrow columns, bad contrast, bad font choice, late-bound style/fonts/js/ads that move what you're reading, dancing hamsters)

interesting! where were you educated (mine was private school, gen X, SW England)? Is this a class thing, or a regional thing, or a generational thing, or what?

Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

#56

Post by gumby »

xiwenc wrote: post #5

I'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…

> Personally I think the extra space does improve readability. I would advocate that the extra spacing should be handled at presentation time.

Extra space between sentences is standard in English typesetting (spacing in printed text is language-specific BTW) precisely for readability: it lets you, in general, read by sentence.

The problems with deferring it to presentation are 1 - "raw"=ish text often is the presentation (consider just long text in a code comment -- and almost anything in the terminal) and 2 - you don't always write in text that is undergoing any kind of presentation processing in realtime (e.g. you're writing TeX, or Markdown for that matter). You want to be able to read it easily.

The inverse is not a problem: a typesetting system can just coalesce spacing and make its own inter-sentence spacing decisions.

Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

#57

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #29
Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #25

Two 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?

You cannot get everything :) It will recognize this as the end of a sentence. One use case I was thinking of was to automatically make spaces after initials non-breaking, as in "R. P. McMurphy".

Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

#59

Post by gnabgib »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #55
gnabgib wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not, also educated in the UK and two spaces were required. HTML makes it hard to double space, and we get a lot of reading material via the web now, so maybe this is why single space is the world standard. It is harder to read, but other aspects contribute here too (overly wide or narrow columns, bad contrast, bad font choice, late-bound style/fonts/js/ads that move what you're reading, dancing hamsters)

interesting! where were you educated (mine was private school, gen X, SW England)? Is this a class thing, or a regional thing, or a generational thing, or what?

State - SW England & Catholic - NE Scotland. I'm not sure? But I first started (outside of school) on a typewriter, and terminals were all fixed width (Acorn, Amiga, BBC) - which the argument goes is where it came from (although the typesetting comment by @OliverJones suggests otherwise).

I wonder if perhaps it was just a function of the teacher you had? The world was less connected (even now parts of education are individual preferences rather than rules). Oxford comma, punctuation inside or outside brackets, etc vs et cetra vs &ct

Re: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)

#60

Post by [deleted] »

nerdponx wrote: post #51
falcolas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that the period is overloaded. Massively overloaded. And not in a BNF (or other regular syntax) style that makes sentence breaks mechanically identifiable. Even a period-space-capital method is far from foolproof, Mr. Anderson.

This raises an interesting consideration for typesetting engines like TeX. Maybe we should only use the full stop character for sentence breaks, and to typeset initialisms use a directive like \initials{USA}. This also allows the style/template to determine whether (or not) to intercalate the initials with full stop characters when typesetting the document.

[deleted]
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