
Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors - blondin
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234170/microsoft-word-two-spaces-period-error-correction-great-space-debate
======
DanielKehoe
We debated this in 1993 on the www-talk mailing list [1]. Terry Allen (an
editor at O'Reilly) wanted rendered HTML documents to follow Tex conventions
with extra space after a period. Marc Andreessen (still at NCSA in 1993)
pointed out browser developers couldn’t do the syntactic analysis required to
distinguish the end of sentences from inter-sentence periods. Guido van Rossum
(working on Python version 1.0 at the time) weighed in on the whitespace issue
and complained “it’s mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff)
that makes people want this.” We ended up with browsers collapsing spaces
between sentences for the web. Most style guides [2] seem to have settled the
issue in favor of a single space but debate rages, eh?

[1] [http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
talk.1993q3/index.h...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
talk.1993q3/index.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_and_style_guides)

~~~
amelius
We should have gone with 1.5 spaces as a compromise.

~~~
oconnor663
Or a slanted space, like a mezuzah.

~~~
fortran77
Only for Ashkenazim/Chasidim. Sephardi and Mizrahi hang them vertically.
[https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-
slan...](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-slanted-
mezuzah/)

------
svat
See
[https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171218122807/http://www.heracliteanriver.com:80/?p=324)
for a great article on the history of wider spaces between sentences — how
there were two traditions of typography and things started to shift towards
equal spaces in the 1930s–1960s (i.e. inter-sentence space being the same as
the inter-word space). I'm even holding on my lap right now a book published
in 1957 by a reputed publisher (Parkinson's Law — Riverside Press / Houghton
Mifflin, 24th printing) that uses wider spaces between sentences. As do of
course all of Knuth's books (e.g. TAOCP Volume 4A from 2011).

For some reason, the other typographical tradition (which I suspect owes its
ascendancy to William Morris in some way) is dominant today (which is fine),
but the way they've nearly completely rewritten history (e.g. blaming “double”
spaces on typewriters) is mystifying.

The current version of the relevant Wikipedia article is here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_senten...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_sentence_spacing&oldid=952211622)

~~~
kqr
I don't strictly oppose this typographical tradition; my native tongue has
many widths of spaces (in particular between a measurement and the unit there
should be a slightly narrower space) and I'm used to it.

What I dislike strongly is this idea that one should alter the source
manuscript to emulate these typographical conventions. It makes no sense to
replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. They are in no way
equivalent!

~~~
jefftk
_> It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular
spaces._

Using a double space is a simple way of telling the computer that you want a
wider space, because otherwise it can't tell that you mean the end of a
sentence.

~~~
evgen
Similar to the spacing convention, we use two hyphens to signify an en dash
and three for an em dash.

~~~
frank2
I can't recall ever seeing three hyphens used to signify an em dash in a
document published on the net. (I added the word "published" to account for
the possibility of the existence of a markup language I am unaware of that
employs your three-hyphen convention.) I am fastidious enough about usage that
I probably would've noticed and remembered.

In my experience, its always two hyphens (or space, hyphen, hyphen, space).

~~~
aliceryhl
LaTeX converts three hyphens into an em-dash.

------
jakub_g
Interesting thing is, living in Europe, AFAIR I never heard about "use two
spaces" rule until now (even if in a long monospace plaintext, I might have
subconsciously used it sometimes to disambiguate).

If I saw that in a Word document, however, I would have thought the author was
a technically-illiterate person who puts extra spaces around commas, quotes,
parentheses etc. or uses 10 spaces instead of 1 tab for indentation.

\---

Talking typography trivia: in French language, it's _mandatory_ to put a space
before "double-characters" like : ; ? ! - the side effect is that it often
allows to easily recognize a French person online even if they write in
English.

Most people: Hello! How are you?

French people : Hello ! How are you ?

~~~
ken
While we're on the topic of typographical prejudice, I confess that if I see a
Microsoft Word document at all, I tend to assume the author is not so
technically literate.

The intersection of "people I've seen use Word" and "people who know how to
write a program" is extremely small.

~~~
sideshowb
Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long?

Reasons for technical people to use word:

1\. A non technical person may need to edit or even just comment on the
document at some point

2\. It's stupid, but in a lot situations people are conditioned to take an
email with the real content attached in a word doc more seriously than a plain
email. You could use a PDF to the same effect but see point 1.

3\. Actually imo it's the best tool for the job it's designed for.
Markup/markdown and adobe have their places but not in everyday business
writing. Or even scientific, it beats latex for journal papers imo (see point
1).

~~~
enriquto
> Wow, what industry do you work in and for how long?

I don't know about the OP, but in the mathematics community you need to have
_a lot_ of confidence on yourself to write a paper in Word. It would be a much
worse offense than using comic-sans, and it would likely be interpreted as a
flamboyant deviation and unnecessary attention whoring.

~~~
sideshowb
Interesting.

I have once written for a journal that insisted on latex but can't say I found
it a good way to work (and that's after plenty of experience with it including
a phd thesis). I can see how it might be better for math heavy writing,
especially 10 years ago, but most of the basic latex math commands work in
word now anyway.

If that field frowns on word so much it should just insist on latex for paper
submissions to save anyone the embarrassment, but people enjoy being dicks I
guess.

~~~
jakub_g
A friend of mine is a physics PhD. Most journals require to use _their exact
LaTeX settings_ for every little detail in order to have an article published.

Which means quite a lot of menial work to redo the article each time you
apply, get refused, and want to send to another journal.

~~~
enriquto
> Which means quite a lot of menial work to redo the article each time you
> apply, get refused, and want to send to another journal.

What kind of menial work do you mean? Isn't that just a matter of changing the
class of your document? Why would you need to change the text of the article
itself?

~~~
sideshowb
I'm not GP but some journals have formatting requirements such as specifying
which sections (e.g. introduction, background, methods, results, discussion)
you must have and in what order. Also relative size of these e.g. how much
background is expected? Word/page length limits both for the abstract and
complete article. Nit picks like whether you refer to Figure 1 or fig. 1 in
the text (and whether it's capitalized if not at sentence start). Usually if
you reformat a bibliography to a different referencing style, even
automatically, it needs checking as the database fields will have been used in
different ways and often errors creep in. Different wording for competing
interests and author contributions statements and maybe a different position
for the former (in the main manuscript / a separate file). The list goes on...

Not to mention often the latex style (or word template) given often directly
contradicts the author instructions page on the website.

------
basicallydan
This may not seem like a big deal, but consider the effect that such an
influential source of “correctness” can have on the general sense of what is
correct.

Spell checkers like Word’s are responsible for the “z” in British English
being demonised. Once upon a time, according to linguist Gretchen McCullen, it
was common in British English to use both z and s. But somewhere along the
line, automated spell checkers categorised one spelling as British and
categorized the other as American, and it created a whole new hobby for many
British people who fancied themselves the guardians of the English language,
courageously pointing out whenever someone used the filthy, “dumbed down”
version from across the Atlantic. We have these brave volunteers to thank for
defending the purity of the famously consistent English language, and for
these people we have spell checkers to thank.

Thanks a lot, spell checkers!

~~~
JdeBP
This sort of thing long pre-dates spell checkers, as other have pointed out.
Here's an older example for you. The word "alright" existed fairly quietly and
unobtrusively in the English language for decades, as a formation similar to
"altogether" and "always", until Fowler and other authorities got hold of it
after World War 1 and demonized it.

* [http://jdebp.uk./FGA/all-right-variants.html](http://jdebp.uk./FGA/all-right-variants.html)

~~~
chrismorgan
Huh, didn’t know “alright” wasn’t universally hunky-dory. In Australian
English it’s a common word and that’s how it’s spelled, and I believe “all
right” would be considered actively wrong.

------
rs23296008n1
I remember a typing teacher being very serious about two spaces after the
dot[1]. He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute
for a zero "0". Fortunately both of these rules are now firmly in the past
along with witch burning. This is progress.

[1] yeah, I could call it a period or a full stop. But its also a dot. Variety
is the spice of life as is properly finishing your

~~~
slap_shot
> He was also serious about the letter O being an acceptable substitute for a
> zero "0".

Whoa, never heard that one. Did that have any major traction at some point?
What was the point?

~~~
snazz
Some older typewriters had no 1 or 0 keys:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/3huau8/this_typewriter_has_no_1_or_0_keys_people_used_i/)

~~~
rs23296008n1
The irony was that all the typewriter keyboards we were using had separate
keys.

------
jrockway
One thing that's nice about being a programmer is that I haven't thought about
any mechanics of text formatting for many years. When I save a file, it just
gets reformatted according to rules that were set up exactly once. I have no
idea whether or not I use spaces or tabs, or whether there are semicolons at
the end of lines, or whether it's "} else {" or "}\nelse {".

It makes me sad that the least technical users have to use the most primitive
software tooling. Something that programmers never think about (because they
are best equipped to program their own programming tools) is apparently
something that results in national studies and extremely snide articles
because nobody will make good tools for them that end the problem once and for
all.

~~~
quicklime
Being a programmer won't save you from this particular style war. If there's a
comment in your code with a sentence that begins with a double space, your
code formatter probably won't flag or remove it in the same way that MS Word
will. And it's likely shown in a monospace font, which makes it more
noticeable.

How many spaces do people put after a full stop in comments in their code?

I go with one, but Vim's J and gq commands annoyingly insert two spaces when
joining sentences from separate lines. I'd love it if someone could tell me
how to fix this.

Edit: found it, the command is "set nojoinspaces"

~~~
ip26
Broadly speaking, internal consistency is the best & most important style. So
just follow the convention of the codebase you are working in (ideally with a
code formatter to help)

------
robbrown451
That's pretty obnoxious. I do two spaces out of habit, and would prefer it
just removed them quietly rather than forcing me to relearn. (which is what
HTML does, effectively.... it displays it the same if you use two spaces)

~~~
fossuser
Yeah I was forced to do this as a child when writing typed stuff in school and
wish I hadn’t, hopefully won’t be too hard to relearn.

We were also forced to have perfect MLA citations in high school where the
librarian had to sign off on it and you had to go rewrite it for any arbitrary
little thing - what a monumental waste of time. They probably still make the
students do that.

~~~
imustbeevil
When I was in school they still had us using MLA but there were sites you
could post any URL or book title and it would generate the citation for you.

Given the seeming inability of many people to gauge the voracity of primary
sources, I'm not so sure the teachers were wrong in this case. I know I liked
reading wikipedia and copying the sources from there, but there's something to
be said for teaching exactly how unreliable a source is based on the inability
to properly cite it.

~~~
fossuser
That software didn’t work for us at the time because we had to follow some
document provided by the school and what software did exist was often slightly
different in the exact placement of punctuation.

I think that focus was a waste - when you really need to do that in graduate
school it’s not hard to figure out and you can use software to do it.

They also made us put inline citations in the writing itself (you couldn’t
even say the year someone was born without citing the source).

Of course the teachers didn’t actually look at the source and discuss its
quality (which may have been useful) - they instead obsessed over minutia of
where exactly a space or period is required in the citation and if it’s a
periodical or website.

------
smitty1e
I try to explain to people that punctuation like "'" and "." is overloaded,
and the real point of the second space is to disambiuguate.

They just don't get it, and perhaps won't understand the problem until it
kicks them in the shin.

The appropriate counterattack might be to introduce some coding and just show
how gnarly sentences are to process as a result.

~~~
prmph
Please can you give an example? That would make your point easier to
understand

~~~
viraptor
Especially the overloaded ".". Apart from usage as a decimal point and
elipsis, where it's obvious, what are the overloaded cases?

~~~
riahi
Abbreviations in the middle of a sentence (When he was talking with Mr. St.
Cyr, he saw a bird. Then...”)

~~~
kwhitefoot
Except that in the tradition current when I was growing up neither Mr nor St
require a dot because they both include the last letter of the word. The dot
is meant to indicate that letters following it have been omitted.

~~~
leephillips
This is a key punctuation difference between North American and UK English. In
NA, we use the dot here, but not in the UK. Actually, I’ve started to adopt
the UK convention, because I think it looks neater.

~~~
xxpor
Meanwhile, the house style at the NYT is to use periods between each letter of
an acronym in certain cases, e.g. W.H.O., D.O.D, and U.N., but not NASA for
some reason.

I've had to occasionally append to existing texts that use the period between
each letter style, and I have to say, it's incredibly annoying to physically
type.

~~~
leephillips
In regard to the NYT style: that’s because WHO, DOD, and UN are not in fact
acronyms, while NASA is. So it’s entirely consistent.

------
sk5t
Two spaces are the only civilized option, and I hope the world's numerous,
two-space-loving lawyers use their now abundant spare time to lay into MSFT
about this.

~~~
copperx
I believe the software should add wide spaces after periods correctly, and not
the user. Two reasons: first, two spaces is too big a separation between
sentences. Second, it's really hard to maintain consistency (or ensure that
there's consistency) in the use of double spacing without the help of
software. It's easy to miss when reviewing.

Let the software do this menial task. That's what computers are for, aren't
they?

~~~
jlokier
A wide space after a period is only sensible when the period ends a sentence.

~~~
rjknight
It would seem sensible to me that a word processor should treat a double-space
as a hint that the preceding period ended a sentence, and a single-space as a
(weaker) hint that it did not.

------
rgoulter
"If you’re still [wanting to use double-spaces], you will be able to ignore
the suggestion. The Editor feature in Word allows users to ignore the
suggestion once, make the change to one space, or turn off the writing-style
suggestion."

On the one hand, it's reasonable to assume that it would be a configurable
option.

On the other hand, I feel like having a title like that doesn't suggest it's
an option/configuration. ("Word now flags double spaces after a period as an
error" makes it sound like it's an error to use double spaces after a period).

"What should the default configuration be?" is an entirely different question
to the flamebait "which one is correct, single or double" (especially given
that there seem to be a number of established uses of both).

------
rmason
People have strong opinions on either side of this issue. I grew up with two
spaces so anything else doesn't look correct. I did however get past indented
spacing on paragraphs pretty quickly and that's mostly gone away.

Thankfully book publishers still use them so they're not going away any time
soon. Sure hope that Word has a way of toggling it off.

~~~
Angostura
As far as I’m aware book publishers ask authors who are using word processors
to use a single space.

------
peterkelly
The whole debate over one space vs. two is just stupid. TeX got it right 40
years ago, recognising that it's no longer necessary to constrain ourselves to
a integral number of space characters (a holdover from the typewriter era),
but instead to use what it calls "glue" as separators between characters,
words, and sentences.

Glue between words is given a higher weighting than that between characters.
Glue between sentences is given a higher weighting than between words. So you
end up with sentences being separated from each other by more whitespace than
words. The exact amount will vary, as the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm
[1] tries to find the most aesthetically pleasing set of places to break
lines.

Arguing for one space or two spaces misses the point.

[1] [http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-
breaking.pdf](http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf)

~~~
brokensegue
So I think it doesn't quite miss the point. the point is that you want one
ASCII space after a period and then you want the layout algorithm to do
something intelligent (like make it as wide as two spaces or 1.5 spaces). This
is why "1 space" is correct and two spaces conflates different layers of
document creation (the textual information to display and how it is laid out).

~~~
jlokier
I think two spaces makes more sense as an input mechanism, although the ship
has sailed so it's no longer possible.

That way the document generator can tell the difference between periods that
are inside sentences, and those which end sentences.

When using one space everywhere in the input, the document generator has to
guess, and will sometimes guess wrong.

That's why HTML doesn't, and can't, do that kind of intelligent layout. End of
sentence wide spaces in the middle of sentences looks awful.

~~~
brokensegue
I mean arguably then we would want a totally different character for end of
sentence and not two spaces in a row. I think modern tools are smart enough to
properly space "Mr. Foo" v."I was sad. John was happy." and if not you can
always manually fix the spacing edge cases yourself without modifying the
text.

~~~
kd5bjo
When I’m writing HTML or TeX, my practice is to use a carriage return after
sentences. That makes it easier to reorder them when I do a revision pass.

------
domador
I grew up putting two spaces after a period. A few years ago, after reading an
article arguing for one space, I decided to try single spaces, as open-
mindedly as possible. However, after a few days I ended up going back to the
double space, since the single space just looked plain ugly to me. To me
single spaces make all sentences look like run-on sentences, at least
visually.

On a different, though my side lost this religious debate, I have higher hopes
for the eventual demise of all caps (which always look ugly to me, even in
document or section titles.)

~~~
wickedwiesel
WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH ALL CAPS?

Personally, this to me (a digital immigrant from the EU), is like shouting at
someone. Apologies for the rudeness.

I wonder if this is universal among people who migrated to the digital world
in the 90s?

Is there a universal way of vocalizing net-lingo? Or how does this evolve over
generations (do digital natives speak the same lingo that we learned?)

------
jlokier
I found these two thoughtful Wikipedia articles give an interesting
background. I didn't know Vi and Emacs used to recognise double spacing as an
end-of-sentence navigation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_me...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_digital_media)

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's still a configurable in Emacs. In particular, it's controlled by the
sentence-end-double-space variable, which on my Emacs (27, built a little over
a year ago) was still set to true by default, i.e. considering sentences to be
separated by double spaces. I have a line in my config that disables this, as
I'm used to the single-space tradition.

------
yellowapple
Well then I guess that's another reason I won't use Word (sure you can turn it
off, and it's a minor annoyance at most, but still).

You one-spacers will have to pry my double-spaced sentences from my cold dead
fingers. It's been scientifically proven to be at least marginally superior¹
(no matter how badly The Verge wants to try to convince anyone otherwise),
it's substantially less ugly than using a single space, and it's easier for
machines to parse (a period followed by two spaces or a line break is
unambiguously the end of a sentence, whereas a period followed by a single
space is - unless the two-space rule is in effect - ambiguous).

This is one substantial reason why, to me, no website will ever be quite as
readable as a PDF (let alone print). At least a PDF-outputting typesetter
(e.g. LaTeX) can intelligently account for this and add the additional
spacing, and it looks _fantastic_ and is delightfully readable when combined
with properly-justified text (also a rarity in websites - and Word documents,
for that matter). But with HTML, I can't even _emulate_ it with double-spaces;
browsers boneheadedly replace even the double-spaces with single spaces.

I certainly don't buy the "saving time" aspect, either:
Ifwereallycaredaboutsavingtime,thenwhybotherwithspacesatall?Imaginehowmanykeyswecouldfitintoakeyboardifwegotridofthespacebarentirely!Nottomentionhowmanybyteswe'dsaveineverytextfile.
(More seriously, unless you _really really_ suck at typing, one v. two spaces
should be entirely insignificant in terms of time spent) (EDIT: and I'm only
half-joking about that suggestion; there are plenty of examples of people who
don't use any spaces _at all_ after sentence-terminating punctuation, so the
aforementioned example is just taking things to their logical conclusion)

\----

¹:
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6)
(The Verge mentioned this in the article, irrationally downplaying its
significance)

------
dubya
It seems slightly odd, given that there are different traditions of between-
sentence spacing, that there doesn't seem to be a Unicode character for the
kind of space between sentences.

~~~
ascorbic
As with all letter spacing, the size is determined by the font metrics. There
doesn't need to be a special character for it.

~~~
thefifthsetpin
Even assuming the goal is to get something like the below?

Mr.^Smith^turned^off^the^lights.^^Then^he^went^to^sleep.

~~~
chispamed
Not the person you asked, but I think so. Some fonts also convert “fi” into a
character where the letter-spacing is very small and the i loses its point, so
there’s definitely a mechanism for letter combination / adaptive spacing.

~~~
jefftk
Converting "fi" into "ﬁ" only requires a lookup table, though fonts can do
some pretty fancy things: [https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-
Reference-Manual/...](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-
Manual/RM06/Chap6morx.html)

Knowing that "Mr. Smith." is intra-sentence but "Me. Smith." is inter-sentence
is well beyond what fonts can do, however.

~~~
dubya
I thought the rule was that ligatures shouldn't cross syllable boundaries.
Like the fi in "fine" can be replaced but not the fi in "barfing", so it would
need to be a bit more than a lookup table. Or maybe a dictionary-sized lookup
table isn't a problem anymore.

~~~
jefftk
I see [https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50660/when-
shoul...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50660/when-should-i-not-
use-a-ligature-in-english-typesetting/50957) suggesting this, but I don't
believe any fonts implement this.

------
daxfohl
Strange, I learned double spacing in school in 1991 and have somehow gone my
whole life until today without knowing or noticing that single spacing was
even a thing.

------
alok-g
If I as an author disable the check and continue to use double spaces, would
it stop flagging on my machine only, or on the readers' machines too? If only
on my machine, then the option to stop the flagging would do no good to me and
I would request Microsoft to stop flagging this.

Instead of making such determinations on English grammar/punctuation/spacing,
I would recommend Microsoft to first improve the grammar checker in Word to
implement the well-settled rules of grammar, where it is significantly lagging
with nearly no developments since a decade or longer.

------
amanzi
Great! No more having to find/replace all the double-spacing in documents I
review.

~~~
Gibbon1
I came to say I know a couple of people that edit and format documents for a
living and they hate getting documents with double spaces.

~~~
PunksATawnyFill
Why?

~~~
ghaff
Because whether or not it is "correct" in some meta-sense, it probably isn't
the style used by whatever organization they're doing the editing for.
Organizations tend to have style guides for external documents. (And may go
off different style guides/rules for different purposes.)

------
tunesmith
I used to be in favor of double-spacing but then learned it was because of
monospaced fonts. So now I only do it when my output is in monospaced fonts.

------
mydongle
Where did people learn to double space? I've never had anyone even mention
such a thing in school.

~~~
Zanni
Typing classes. That would be typing on an actual typewriter, not
"keyboarding" on a computer.

~~~
yellowapple
I learned to touch-type on a computer, and still learned to use two spaces.

------
Jemm
Double spaces are considerably more readable, especially for those of us with
visual impairments.

------
verytrivial
I stopped using Word when I need section numbering that wasn't completely
broken. I am therefore not massively surprised they've left that broken for 20
years and decided instead to take sides in a white-space religious war. You
know, to "help users."

------
throwaway_pdp09
This kind of deliberate but trivial breakage can't be an accident, and there's
enought precedent ("let's screw with the VS/office interface today shall we").
So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the news?
or something else.

But I don't believe that 'correcting' a typographical convention is what this
is directly about.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _So MS is up to something else, perhaps trying to keep themselves in the
> news? or something else._

In larger teams and companies, changes move pretty slow through the design-
development-QA pipeline. Maybe this change was made a year ago, and worked its
way through the pipes only now?

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
What has this to do with my suggestion?

------
bdcravens
Having learned to type on a typewriter in the early 90s (yet another way to
date myself) for a long time I used two spaces in word processing and emails
etc, and then switched to one as it seemed the popular convention. At some
point my brain made the switch to what it considers "normal". It's been so
long, I can't remember when that happened.

------
progval
> Microsoft has settled the great space debate

No, Microsoft doesn't get to "settle" a language issue.

This also reminds me that some (many?) French speaker believe upper-case
accentuated letters (eg. É È À) are incorrect, just because it's impossible to
type them on Windows (unless you know the right alt code, but most people
don't) and typewriters.

------
WolfOliver
I was so annoyed reading text with two spaces after each other that I've built
a writing application [1] that just does not allow to insert two spaces or
newlines.

[1] [https://monsterwriter.app](https://monsterwriter.app)

------
pedrocx486
This reminds me of the Tabs vs Space discussion, and how once Bill Gates did
an AMA on Reddit and his answer was that tabs was better because of
consistency.

~~~
saagarjha
Consistency with what, all the other code that uses tabs?

~~~
citrin_ru
In code which uses tabs one logical indentation level is always one tab. You
can show tab with different width in you editor, but the source code is
consistent.

If spaces are used you never know how many spaces is one logical level. There
is no agreement - some people prefer 2 spaces, some 4 and may be somebody uses
8 or 6.

Even worse - I sometimes see when in a single source file some parts use 2
spaces for one logical indent and some - 4 spaces.

------
hyko
An historic day. Here’s Bill Hill advocating a single space after the period
back in the early 2000’s:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3NsdPNbZY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3NsdPNbZY)

------
RaceWon
The only thing more annoying is my car locks itself if I don't open the
drivers side door. So basically when you unlock your car; open a rear door to
retrieve some items, dropping your keys on the rear seat to free up both
hands, and then shut the door because (A) it's raining, or (B) it's blocking
your path or (C) any other reason--you will be locked out, and good and truly
fucked. It's pure genius!

The only feature I enjoyed more, was the time the computer slammed on the
brakes (for no real) reason while I was merging (my fault because I did
neglect to shut off that idiotic automatic brake feature). There is however,
no way to disable the automatic door locking feature.

That reminds me--I need to tape a brick inside of one of the wheel wells so I
can smash open one of the windows, so I don't freeze to death some snowy
winter night.

------
getlawgdon
Many technical replies. Hardly any mentions of CMOS or other real authorities.

~~~
DanielKehoe
Yes. It seems many developers will honor coding conventions or Internet RFCs
but love to engage in debate about orthography when it suits them, rather than
referring to the Chicago Manual of Style or another authority.

------
matiasz
[https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-
sentences....](https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-
sentences.html)

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montroser
How self-righteous are The Verge's writings about this...

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wasdfff
This ruined me when I first tried to use gtypist. Couldn’t easily see the
double space and got like every line wrong the first go around.

------
avalys
Argh! It’s not my fault, I was brainwashed as a child. I try to keep it down
to just one space but I can’t help myself. I’m the victim here!

~~~
andrew_xor_andy
You did a great job in that comment, though :)

~~~
3131s
It's just how HTML is rendered, you'll never know whether OP used 1 or 2
spaces in that comment.

~~~
shpx
If you look at the comment through the Hacker News API, there's two spaces
before the last sentence.

[https://hacker-
news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?pri...](https://hacker-
news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22975749.json?print=pretty)

Although, the documentation says that field is HTML, so I'm not sure what to
think.

[https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

~~~
rbinv
Same in the HTML markup.

------
jasper3
That's good. It's super annoying to read sentences that start with a double
space, it burdens my reading speed.

------
jccalhoun
As Jebus intended. Now if we can just enact the death penalty for people who
don't use the Oxford comma!

------
jasoneckert
I prefer a single space myself.

However, my copyeditor recently told me that, in order to promote distancing,
MLA is going back to two spaces after a period for the remainder of this
year...

------
seemslegit
So war then.

------
throwaway55554
Great! Maybe I can finally kick the habit.

------
redwall_hp
Good. The only reason that habit is a thing is because of typewriters, which
are monospaced. Some people just cargo culted the practice long past its
expiration date...which makes for awkward spacing.

~~~
CamperBob2
The practice originally came from typesetting. If anything, it's _more_
relevant and appropriate now than it was in the days when your font choices
were limited to 12-point Pica and Elite.

~~~
brandmeyer
Programs that do typesetting for you (Markdown, LaTeX), will ignore the number
of spaces after the period in your "source" code and lay it out in the output
with a single space.

I've gotten in the habit of single-space in variable-width fonts, and double-
space in fixed-width fonts.

~~~
gorgoiler
Not so for the default mode in LaTeX.

It tries to guess which periods indicate end-of-sentence (based on whether the
next letter is capitalized) and will add additional horizontal space
accordingly, unless you tell it not to by declaring your document uses “French
Spacing”.

(Edit: and my memory may be serving me incorrectly here, but I recall 20 years
ago having a support package that also detected double-space in the source as
another indicator of end-of-sentence, but that was probably a non standard
extension.)

~~~
wodenokoto
Won’t that mess up titles like Dr. Livingstone and Mr. President?

Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

~~~
yellowapple
> Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

It would be a lot less hard if we were able to unambiguously tell the computer
whether a period ends a sentence. I wonder how we could _possibly_ do that...

(Less sarcastically: a lot of Unix programs - Emacs, vim, troff, etc. - solve
this problem by defaulting to double-spaced sentences, thus resolving the
ambiguity. Kinda odd that this ain't the Tex approach; there's already
precedent by using doubled-up ``backquotes'' and ``single quotes'' to produce
“smart double quotes”, and lone `backquotes' and `single quotes' similarly
become ‘smart single quotes’.)

