

Why you should never use two spaces after a period - shawndumas
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.single.html

======
thorum
The canonical reply to this article, by Steve Losh:

<http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/why-i-two-space/>

Among other things, he points out that computers have a much easier time
parsing sentences which are clearly separated by two spaces, and that some
features in e.g. vim don't work well with single-spaced sentences.

------
gnosis
Summary of the article's reasons to use one space between sentences:

1\. Typographers and style manuals tell you to.

2\. Two spaces were necessary when using monospace fonts; but now that
everyone uses proportional fonts, it's no longer necessary.

3\. It's ugly.

\---

I don't find these arguments very persuasive. I have my own aesthetic sense,
and I don't need some authority to tell me what's ugly or not. I can tell that
for myself, thank you very much. To me, two spaces between sentences look just
fine.

Second, I find it easier to tell where one sentence ends and another sentence
begins when they're separated by two spaces. A single space and a little tiny
period is just not enough.. especially when reading at high speed, and when
there are really long sentences.

If only one space separates sentences, and I want to skip to the next
sentence, I'll have to read a lot more carefully than if there are two spaces
-- when it becomes much more obvious where the separation is. Using one space
in between sentences makes paragraphs look like one long run-on sentence.

~~~
traeblain
Agreed that his arguments don't direct my practice. I have to agree with Steve
Losh in that all the tools for publishing now days correct for this. And it
makes the source material easier to read and parse.

Why then does he destroy his argument at the end by rallying his claim on the
subjectivity of ugliness. To this day I still find the double space prettier
and find print that use it easier to read. 3. is too much of an opinion to
claim sound reason.

------
IbJacked
I like the aesthetics of two spaces, as well. Especially when using a
proportional font since a proportional space is narrower than an average
character width. A "." and a skinny space doesn't provide much of a visual
separation.

I've gotten over not liking seeing a single space from others, and others can
get over seeing my double-spaces :)

------
matmann2001
Yeah. I'm still gonna use 2 spaces. It looks better to me.

------
xrt
Robin Williams devotes a chapter of her book, "The PC is not a Typewriter", on
the subject. She concurs.

[http://www.amazon.com/Pc-Not-Typewriter-Robin-
Williams/dp/09...](http://www.amazon.com/Pc-Not-Typewriter-Robin-
Williams/dp/0938151495)

------
glesica
I can't stand two spaces after periods. It gives me a weird twitch. I
sometimes do a find-replace before even reading a document. It is a
superfluous keystroke, but I think what really bothers me is that it just
looks ugly and uneven to me.

------
MalphasWats
Ironically, we're all reading this on the web, where browsers merrily remove
superfluous white space. If every browser can agree on that, given how much
they all disagree on, I'll take that as a pretty good endorsement for single-
spacing.

------
chatmasta
This guy spent a long time building up a logical argument against using two
spaces, then threw all his work out the window in the final paragraphs by
concluding that the "aesthetics" of two spaces were too ugly for common use.

------
drobilla
Never say never. This only applies to WYSIWG. When writing in plain text
source formats, the two spaces enable tools to distinguish the end of a
sentence from abbreviations and other uses of the period. For example, emacs
uses this distinction for column filling and other text manipulations.

Using a single space is ambiguous; ambiguous is bad. Therefore two spaces is
best in place text.

------
girzel
This, sirs, is why LaTeX asks you to differentiate between sentence-ending
periods and non-sentence-ending periods in source code, and adds just a little
bit of elasticity to the sentence-ending periods during compilation. The tools
that make things beautiful know how to make things beautiful.

The rest of the time, there's:

(setq sentence-end-double-space nil)

------
bobinator30
>Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s.

except for programmers

------
Svip
And you sir, leave punctuations within quotation marks where they do not
belong and use serial commas. I believe I need to read no further.

