
Never Put Two Spaces After a Period - ALee
http://www.businessinsider.com/never-put-two-spaces-after-a-period-2014-1
======
intopieces
>When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong-that, in fact, the correct
way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful
space-the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.

Pretty rich talk from someone who used a hyphen in place of an em dash.

~~~
anotheryou
Do you put spaces around em dashes—those of this kind?

edit: Ah, in german we use a shorter one with spaces – like this. Still longer
than a minus: -

~~~
intopieces
I usually do put spaces around them, but that is a style choice I consider
less important than the length of the dash itself. The style the author uses
is indistinguishable from a hyphenated noun, like "hurdy-gurdy."

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Yohohoman
I personally have no idea about typography, but I use double space after a
period for semantics --- as a sentence terminator. because, you know, there
are languages where periods are used not only for terminating sentences.

as a side note --- capitalising the first letter of a sentence is a convention
similar to putting two spaces between sentences. why does the author do this?

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Camillo
The double-space just says "I was raised in the jungle by wild typists, and
did not lay my eyes upon a printed book until the age of 25".

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ddingus
...or not.

I do it, likely will continue, and still do use monospace fonts.

What will happen is people will largely center on one or another, have their
reasons, with a majority doing single space.

As for caps lock, clearly the author has not dirtied their refined hands on
many numerical control systems. Oh, the shame and horror!

Sans the ongoing lectures about what "we want" as writers, one space would
probably be adopted far more rapidly. Sometimes we want flow, sometimes we
want a pause, and we may want a lot of things not necessarily in line with
style purists best efforts.

TL;DR (complete with pretentious semicolon) I'm so sorry this trivia is
elevated to such a point of concern. I feel you. Really. Ahem. (Pause
intended, made explicit as HN renders with one space -a fine solution.)

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unsignedint
I have had numerous occasions discussing this topics b with my peers before
and concluded this is really like a religion and will be very difficult to
convince anyone to change to another. (I use one space myself.)

It causes bit of side effects to have two spaces after period, like if one of
them rolling into beginning of a new line and what they ought to do is to
define those spaces as a non-breakable spaces, to indicate they shouldn't be
separated, but I don't see this praciticed too often.

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Nelkins
ha, Even with this article being from 2014, I find it funny to see that the
author continued to pen jeremiads on the epidemic of two spaces in modern
society for years[1]. Sort of an unusual (and in my mind, pretentious) cause
to take up.

In any case, it's not true. If you want to use two spaces after a period,
continue to do so--I do. Here's a long rebuttal on why two spaces after a
period doesn't really matter[2] and the corresponding HN discussion from four
years ago[3].

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html)

[2]
[http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324](http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385448)

Edit: I typed this comment with two spaces after each period. Try it yourself,
you'll see the rendered HTML only has one space. This is a solved problem
folks, just do it however you like!

Edit2: Just realized that even though this Business Insider article is dated
2014, the article is the same one the author wrote in 2011.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You can continue to do so. But your readers will hate you if you go to the
extra effort of adding non-breaking spaces, because many people find two
spaces in electronic text painfully distracting.

The "rule" is literally a waste of space. It's like playing an annoying
harpsichord accompaniment in the background to all your voice and video calls.

The history is beside the point. The reality is the web has its own de facto
standards enforced in HTML, as does modern typography, as does email.

Obscure forgotten metal print layout traditions from the 18th and 19th
centuries are a historical footnote now, and not relevant to any of the above.

------
rleigh
Emacs puts two spaces after a period when reflowing paragraphs. So I've been
going with that default for years as the path of least resistance. Since it
makes monospaced text slightly more readable and most rendered text output
(TeX, Sphinx, Markdown etc.) ignore the additional space and omit it from
their output, it doesn't have any significant detraction to me as an author,
so I'll continue to live in the two space camp.

~~~
SamReidHughes
In Emacs there's an option to change that.

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flukus
TIL a lot of people use two spaces and are very passionate about it. I've
never heard of this in my life.

~~~
Ntrails
I was told to do it as a child, I've never thought about it since. When I
wrote letters, incidentally, I would also probably leave more space between
full stops and new sentences than I would between words?

Since his main argument is "nobody uses monospaced fonts" but my first action
upon starting a new job is to change all the text defaults to be consolas I
feel fine about my behaviour.

~~~
flukus
Is it an american thing? Or maybe an age thing? As I was going through school
a lot of this stuff (any right alignment, commas after dear sir, etc) were
being dropped. The only one that sunk it was typing out full names for
numbers, one and twenty-two instead of 1 and 22, but I only stick to that up
to ten, not 1000 like I was taught.

~~~
Ntrails
Dunno, I'm English so it's not an American thing. I don't even ever remember
being taught it specifically but obviously I was because I sure as hell didn't
make it up myself :p

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sunstone
In the days of ink and paper the extra space had a measurable cost that
accountants considered unconscionable. Those days are gone but the sentiment
continues as a ghost of past technologies in the minds of those who can't move
on.

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makecheck
I think it is far easier to read with two spaces, even in proportional fonts;
on web pages I even add a Unicode non-breaking space after the period so that
the browser will not absorb it.

~~~
DerekL
What you should do instead is use an en or em space.

Some people put a regular space and then a non-breaking space after the
period. But this is a really bad idea, because if the line is broken after the
sentence, the non-breaking space is attached to the start of the next
sentence, so it gets indented.

~~~
milesrout
No, what you should do is just put a space or two spaces. You should not try
to reinvent typography. Two spaces means that if software wants to try to find
sentences, it can easily do so, but will still render properly (as a single
space) if not.

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repsilat
Well, now that browsers and everything else will ignore the second space we
can focus on more important things, like which one computers prefer. And
computers probably prefer two spaces so they can tell acronyms and
abbreviations from the ends of sentences.

I'll never get used to typing that second space, but it beats a single newline
or bad kerning or whatever the alternative is.

------
hiperlink
Steve Losh has some arguments for putting two:
[http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/why-i-two-
space/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/why-i-two-space/)

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ionised
Weird.

Never heard of this two-space thing before, at least not growing up and
working in the UK.

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danjoc
"Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s."

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hilbert42
""Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.

Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the typewritten word
decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. "

I really think this guy Farhad Manjoo is trying to buy an argument where one
doesn't exist. Perhaps he's practicing for April Fools' Day which isn't far
off!

In his aforementioned quote, either he fails to justify his statements/claims
or he covers a lot of mileage to prove minor points, same goes for the rest of
his post. Sure, he has links to references and that fine (and the ones I
looked at I didn't dispute,)—however that's not the most significant point.

Just because someone or authority dictates or pontificates from upon high that
something is this or that, or is supposed to be a certain way etc. doesn't
give that person or anything he says higher authority or even any credibility
whatsoever. Moreover, often so-called 'orthodoxy' can actually be wrong or
misinterpreted.

That said, professional standards are very important, so is the craft and
experience of the artisan. However, 'double spacing after a stop between
sentences' simply doesn't drop into this category, it's a lower-order
exercise. It is not as if the typist who puts in a 'double-stop' is
'performing' at the level of a Graphic artists or typesetter does when he/she
say typesets a novel in Palatino for general market release.

If the typist does worry thus, then I'd humbly suggest that he/she is overly
obsessed about the matter or has some kind of fetish about it.

(No, I'm not being derogatory here as I actually understand the issue. Let me
give you an example. When, say, I'm in a supermarket checkout aisle that has a
checkout sign to the effect "People with less than 12 items" then I have a
strong urge to cross out 'less' and replace it with the correct word 'fewer'
but I never act upon it.)

It boils down to this, I am a very fussy person but nowhere as fussy as Farhad
Manjoo, he strikes me as bordering on the obsessive.

The Issues as I perceive them: \---------------------------------------

1\. I use 'double spacing after a stop between sentences' and a colon because
it emphases the stop or colon itself. That's to say, it strengthens the action
of the punctuation and makes the page more readable. Moreover, I have done so
for years, and I have no intention of stopping.

1.1 Often seriffed fonts with various degrees of kerning etc. one often sees
in books makes the punctuation almost illegible—concomitantly, thus so the
text. There are many, many examples of this done by so-called professionals!

1.2 THE FACT THAT THE FONT/LAYOUT METRICS FOR THOSE TYPEFACES IS PRECISELY
CORRECT AS SPECIFIED FOR THE TYPEFACE/FONT COMBINATION DOES NOT NECESSARILY
ENSURE GOOD READABILITY. THESE BOOKS WOULD BE BETTER OFF BY INCREASING INTER-
SENTENCE SPACING [ALBEIT NOT NECESSARILY TWO FULL SPACES]. SAME ALSO APPLIES
TO THE INAPPROPRIATELY SMALL INTER-PARAGRAPH SPACING.

2\. Many others who I have observed over the years and who use two spaces
after a stop also consider the matter a readability issue—double spacing often
makes text more readable/understandable! Fact!

2.1 If I type a large document with _single_ spacing after the stop and then I
read it back some weeks afterwards (after I've forgotten the fine detail of
what I typed), then do the same with identical text but with _double_ spacing,
then I find the _double spacing_ considerably easier to read. In my case, it's
a fact (perhaps for Farhad Manjoo there's no difference but he shouldn't
criticise those who do find the increased spacing better).

2.2 You might say the 'test' in 2.1 is fanciful and that I'm lying about it,
as who would ever bother doing a comparison like that in the first place?
However, I can assure you that such comparisons do happen. Often, I can have
two identical documents even down to the font and almost to the layout. It
mostly occurs when 'copy' goes into web pages or HTML editors that are set to
automatically convert double spacing to single [i.e.: the page defaults to
single spacing]. In fact, such comparisons happen quite regularly.

2.3 By insisting that I read 'single-spaced' documents then Farhad Manjoo
would effectively disadvantage me because of my 'handicap'. There are many
other typists out there who expedience reading text the same way I do. So what
to do with us all? Perhaps shoot us, or put us all down like a sick dog?

2.4 In my case, the _double_ spacing after a stop/colon is so ingrained that I
can get rather annoyed and irritated when posting to web sites that
automatically convert from 'double' to 'single' space when posted. Sometimes
there is no way around the problem but often there is. use ALT-255 or another
Unicode blank symbol to insert the extra blank. If enough of us did that then
the nastily little authoritarian people who write code for such pages might
eventually get the message!

3\. Farhad Manjoo seems to spend precious little time discussing the very real
effect 'double spacing after a stop' has when the typeface and its fonts are
changed. Sometimes double spacing look awkward and often it does not depending
on which typeface is used. Use a modern typing font such as Calibri and it
hardly matters. This is a far too detailed a subjects cover here, suffice to
say, different typefaces and different weights have a psycho-visual impact on
the reader—that's why we use different typefaces with various font weights,
etc.

3.1 The fact, that Farhad Manjoo is 'blinded' by a page of 'spaces' between
sentences when 'double-space after stop' is used means that he actually
perceives the page in a different visual way as do many others do. If so, I
can actually understand his problem. Like many, I DO NOT notice these
'spaces', for me the effect is the 'area-under-a-curve' stuff—the integrand if
you like—which, overall, makes the page have better readability performance
when double space is used. No more, no less!

3.2 If disturbing 'double-space after stop' 'spaces' on a page cause Farhad
Manjoo so much bother, then what does he do when the line spacing/line height
is changed to double or even triple height. What does he do when the character
spacing is adjusted or the kerning not set to his liking? It must be a
nightmare for him—he must go around examining pages for "correctness"—and if
they're "wrong" his distraction must make it difficult for him to comprehend
the page.

[Actually, I can understand typeface/layout distraction. I'll often not buy a
book if the typeface / fonts etc. are very poorly executed (but it does have
to be bad, usually the content is more important and overrules my resistance).

3.3 Can Farhad Manjoo tell me how he copes with automatically justified text
[i.e.: text with no ragged right]? Often such text can look truly horrible,
nevertheless, it is a standard layout methodology used and accepted by Graphic
artists and fontographers. Does this mean that because it's "officially" part
of the layout 'canon' then Farhad Manjoo will fully accept it even though it
is distractingly ugly?

3.4 Graphic artists and fontographers, etc. aren't the right people to judge
the single/double spacing after stop rule/issue. These people are trained to
notice the finest details with respect to the printed page and thus have a far
too critical an eye.

3.4.1 The average user rarely notices 'typeface issues' at the 'minutiae'
level, in fact I'm often horrified by the typeface/font 'sins' that so many
are actually capable of committing.

3.4.2 I know, I am very fussy (in fact pedantic) about the typefaces and font
weights that I use. I select them very carefully. Nevertheless, I'm not as
fixed in my views as some professionals who work with type on a daily basis
are. I am currently working on a long report. Considerable effort went into
selecting the margins, footnote size, main heading (Aharoni 13pt), sub-
headings (Aharoni, 10pt), main text (Calibri 10.5pt) block-text quotes
(Rockwell 9 & 9.5), footers (Calibri 9). This attention to detail shows that I
am sensitive to the issues of typefaces and layout, and it's why I reckon
people who whinge and complain about the 'double spacing after stop' matter
are just overly obsessive.

3.4.3 Why would I take the time to respond in so much detail to Farhad Manjoo
post unless I was reasonably obsessive? Well, even though I accept and
understand the purity—or should I sanctity—of the fontographer's typeface
metrics, and, ipso facto, that I also understand that 'double spaces after
stop' technically violates the aesthetics of these metrics, that it is such a
small and trivial (but often useful) matter in the greater scheme of things
that I consider it almost unworthy of discussion.

Simply, if I'm obsessed with such trivial details and it doesn't worry me one
iota, then that Farhad Manjoo and his ilk in a special class of their own.
QED.

4\. Microsoft Word has a setup setting which automatically enforces 'double
spaces between sentences'—when set, put in a single space or three spaces and
the grammar checker kicks in with a wiggly underline! If Microsoft took the
trouble to provide the option in Word then clearly many use it and find it
acceptable!

4.1 One of the reasons I do not use OpenOffice/LibreOffice very often is that
it DOES NOT ENFORCE the 'double space after a stop between sentences'!

LibreOffice developers take note! Stop shooting yourselves in the collective
foot and give users the options they want!

------
ce4
Obligatory xkcd on kerning :)

[https://xkcd.com/1015/](https://xkcd.com/1015/)

