

Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period - panarky
http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/

======
hopeless
I'm a two-spacer ^. Perhaps it is wrong by current standards but I still think
it adds to the scan-ability of a paragraph. They call a paragraph full of
holes ugly, I call it easier to scan.

And for the record, monospaced fonts aren't dead: all sensible text editors
use them. Monospaced fonts are what I use to write ruby code (not many
sentences appear there), java code (sigh... Lots of comments and sentences),
and even LaTeX documents. I normally compose documents and long emails in a
text editor exactly because the typography of a word processor is a
distraction. Even this comment box uses a monospaced font!

^ except on the iPhone where it's impossible/awkward

~~~
1337p337
The article glosses over monospace fonts, and leads with Assange, quite
possibly for Google News juice, before admitting on page two that it's just a
convention preferred by lots of typographers for proportional fonts.

In proportional fonts, a single space is better, although monospace uses two
after a full stop and after a colon. This is is to prevent "rivers" and make
it clearer where one sentence ends and another begins.

I type using two spaces, because a lot of what I type ends up rendered
monospace (emails, comments in code, etc.). The nice thing about HTML, though,
is that when I view the source, it's usually monospace, but the document will
be rendered with a single space, and usually in a proportional font. (I know
GMail and Google Groups hate monospace, so a lot of source code and diagrams
look unbearable. There were ways to fix this, but I abandoned GMail last year;
the Buzz debackle was the last straw in a long line of straws like its lack of
threads. That's a different story, though.)

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apotheon
He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong.

Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space
that was favored by typesetters for proportional typefaces because typewriters
didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually
"correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in
proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that
aids in quicker text scanning by eye.

The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic
publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either
money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two
(or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for
non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability
concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.

As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up
with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in
such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary
to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their
cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know
who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though:
having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space
between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having
to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional
typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends
to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.

For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their
disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably
lacking in the proud correctness he claims.

------
praptak
I thought that two spaces are to discern between the period that ends a mid-
sentence abbreviation and one that finishes a sentence.

By the way - I think that the layout should be dealt with by the software that
converts the string of characters to an actual graphical context. Why should I
care what font will my text be displayed with? I prefer software that
understands "end of sentence", "end of paragraph", maybe "end of abbreviation"
(if necessary to make this distinction) and puts whatever amount of whitespace
is appropriate for this to look decent. This usually isn't even an integer
number of spaces, but rather a fractional one.

And yeah, I'm a single-spacer but rather because of laziness than anything
else.

TLDR: A space in ASCII (or Unicode) encoding of the text != amount of
whitespace in layout.

~~~
apotheon
I'm inclined to think you're right -- except that two spaces between sentences
should still be the norm when typing, until AI sufficient to correctly guess
what kind of period you are using is invented, so that the software has the
cues necessary to recognize what type of period you used.

------
ZeroComplete
Honestly I find his argument rather moronic. There's a long list of outdated
practices that cost a ton more in productivity than double spaces and he has
little hope of changing them as well.

Also, I _like_ Courier AND Terminal.

NOTE: Single my spacing here is due to the iPad, not preference.

~~~
ugh
I think HN collapses two spaces. Let me just test that.

Edit: Indeed, HN won’t allow for two spaces.

Second edit: The two spaces are in the source text. Is this a HTML thing?

Third edit: Yes, this is a HTML thing. I somehow must have forgotten how HTML
treats whitespace.

~~~
markkanof
It's probably standard HTML rendering that is collapsing the spaces. That will
happen unless you put an explicit space using &nbsp;.

------
grovulent
I'd love to see this guy worked up over an issue that actually matters...

~~~
Natsu
Try writing him a letter...

in Comic Sans ;)

------
wladimir
Thank HTML (and TeX) for auto-collapsing consecutive whitespace...

~~~
rflrob
Not only does TeX collapse consecutive whitespace, when typesetting justified
text, it will put whitespace back in the least ugly way it can figure out.
It's systems like this that make me think humans shouldn't be responsible for
things like "number of spaces" at all, unless they _really_ know what they're
doing.

~~~
wladimir
Agreed. It's too trivial for humans to have to worry about, anyway. Let alone
to rant about.

~~~
bld
Using LyX, you can't even type extraneous space without extra effort.

------
kia
Single page

<http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/pagenum/all/>

------
iwwr
Typesetters have strange "rules," like quotes straddling "punctuation."

~~~
mfukar
I thought that's an American thing.

~~~
apotheon
What -- quotes straddling punctuation?

I don't know if it's "an American thing" but, as a resident of the USA, I find
it "a stupid thing". Note my period outside the quotes.

Periods go inside quotes, in my world at least, when the quoted text
originally included either a comma or period at the point where the quotation
ends. Otherwise, the period goes outside the quotes, because putting it inside
the quotes makes it an inaccurate quote.

Damned journalistic typesetters are idiots.

~~~
bertil
Actually, it’s like the two-space after periods, replacing a longer space:
it's a workaround when typesetting does not collapse punctuations. The dot
should be below the outer edge of the quotes, otherwise you have too much
diagonal white space — not unlike upper-case A and V should be set closer.

------
apotheon
Slate Invaders: Why You Should Use Two Spaces Between Sentences

<http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57>

HN submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2104266>

------
hardik988
'that anyone savvy enough to read Slate ...'

should be able to write a simple filter for his e-mail.

str_replace('. ','. ',$str); in PHP or str.replace('. ','. ') in Python.

I know it's a rudimentary solution but it'll work if one can get so worked up
over such trivialities.

------
Dylan16807
I don't understand the typewriter argument; monospaced fonts put even _more_
space between characters.

------
HilbertSpace
The guy is wound up and not thinking clearly.

For nearly all my typing, I use a monospaced font because it makes getting
vertical alignment, especially in tables, MUCH easier.

Essentially all my high quality word whacking goes through Knuth's TeX where
his care with spacing is high beyond belief. There I include some TeX tricks
to put a 'little' extra space after the end of a sentence, but to TeX a
'space' does not have a fixed width and gets adjusted along with all the rest
of Knuth's complicated spacing algorithms.

For what a blog such as HN does with my text with two spaces after each
sentence is just up to HN, and I haven't gone to the trouble to determine
what.

Here's where the guy is wrong:

First, he is way too strong on running down monospaced fonts. Especially for
programmers on HN, programming source code nearly always has to look much
better in a monospaced font.

Second, and worse, the guy doesn't understand that in high quality typesetting
the width of a space is not fixed. So, he is ranting about rubber.

Mostly all he is doing is ranting. Since he is writing for 'Slate', we have to
suspect that he is all wound up, "full of sound and fury signifying nothing".
Out brief candle. Nonsense. Detritus on the scrap heap of history nonsense.
That's why I am always reluctant to read 'Slate': It's written for old maid
high school English literature teachers who gush about Shaky Spire.

~~~
ugh
Programmers use monospaced fonts. (Undoubtedly for good reasons.) Nobody else
does.

(I’m actually no programmer and I like to use Letter Gothic – a monospaced
font – for my personal written correspondence on paper. I don’t want my
letters to look like they were sent from some corporation and the monospaced
font makes the letters more personal without being childish. I would guess
that I’m in a small minority, though.)

~~~
1337p337
Not just programmers. I've done some work for a lawyer, and a lot of filings
and briefs use monospace fonts (wide margins and double-spacing, too). Most
drafts and manuscripts are the same, to make things easier to mark up. I think
it's also true of screenplays, but I've only had incidental contact with
those. I'm sure plenty of other fields use monospace.

~~~
apotheon
Basically, any field that requires any rigor tends to deal a lot in monospace
fonts. Writing for Slate is not one of those fields.

~~~
ugh
I see no connection between rigor and monospace fonts. Where do you see it?

~~~
apotheon
Formatting.

It's tougher to render (for instance) source code in a clear, easily
understood fashion in a proportional font than in a monospace font. The same
goes for a lot of mathematical and scientific writing, cases where red-pen
editor's marks are needed, and so on.

