
Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong – lies typographers tell about history - eru
http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324
======
harshreality
Why is it that rarely does anyone distinguish _output format_ from _source
format_ in these discussions?

Two spaces are used to semantically separate sentences in source format. They
can be collapsed or modified for typeset output (like HTML rendering), but
nobody should be telling an author to use single space in _source format_ if
the author wants to add the additional semantic separation between sentences.

Particularly at fault are sanitizers like tidy (not just stand-alone, but
sometimes used as a component in document editors) which will collapse
multiple spaces by default. They're not doing any other html rendering, and
they're not minifying the html either, so why do they insist on removing a
common form of semantic content information in the source document? Collapse
>2 spaces to 2 in some cases, perhaps, but not 2 to 1, particularly not after
punctuation.

The two spaces vs one space argument for how text should be typeset is a
_completely different issue_ and unrelated to the question of how many spaces
human typists should use between sentences. Using two spaces between sentences
happens to make it _easier_ for typesetting software to automatically apply
whatever magical 1+epsilon or 1-epsilon inter-sentence spacing it deems best,
assuming the typesetting software can deduce that the author is using the two-
space sentence convention (otherwise it has to fall back on heuristics, which
are not perfect).

Any author is free to choose how many spaces to use between sentences, but
collapsing 2 spaces when editing others' documents is _wrong_ , and so is
preventing an author from using two spaces. Doing so _removes information
content_ from the document, which can only be restored perfectly by humans (or
other things with human-level natural language processing ability).

~~~
anigbrowl
_Two spaces are used to semantically separate sentences in source format._

That's the function of the period, which does the job perfectly well already,
as you demonstrate yourself.

 _Any author is free to choose how many spaces to use between sentences, but
collapsing 2 spaces when editing others ' documents is_ wrong, _and so is
preventing an author from using two spaces. Doing so removes information
content from the document, which can only be restored perfectly by humans (or
other things with human-level natural language processing ability)._

I could just as easily argue that it's _wrong_ to include redundant semantic
information. If I were to begin using double commas,, should everyone else
alter their reading habits to accommodate my affectation? Fuck that.

~~~
asdfs
>That's the function of the period,

This breaks in the case of "Mr. Jones went to the store. He enjoys buying
things." The spacing after 'Mr.' should be less than after 'store.'. If two
spaces are prohibited, you have the following options, neither of them
particularly satisfactory:

-The user must input some form of special Unicode space character after 'Mr.'

-The display software must include a list of all words that, when followed by a period, should not include extra space (e.g., "Mr, Mrs, Messrs, etc, e.g, i.e" and so forth).

~~~
anigbrowl
Says you. I was fine with it being the same when I learned to type (on a
typewriter) and having text-presentation software do some micro kerning on
certain abbreviations doesn't bother me in the least; automating such drudgery
is one of the main reasons to use computers in the first place.

A third option is to dispense with the punctuation marks on abbreviations and
simply refer to 'Mr Jones.' This took a little getting used to, but since real
grammatical consistency would involve abbreviating 'Mister' as 'M'r,' (a
practice which you can see in some older books and which persisted with
obscure words like f'c's'le) dropping the period seems simpler. It's good
enough for the _Economist_ , whose style guide I prefer.

~~~
eru
What's "f'c's'le"?

~~~
pekim
I would guess (but don't know) that it's forecastle.

~~~
jonnathanson
Sure is. :)

I'm a read-aloud-in-my-head kind of reader, and I remember really struggling
with that one in _Moby Dick_.

(It's "fo'c'sle," by the way, sometimes even encountered as "fo'c's'le." In
the latter case, I wonder why simply writing "forecastle" wasn't the easier
choice back in the day).

~~~
ams6110
It's closer to the actual pronunciation of "folk•sel"

------
jere
I hate double spacing. And you can dismiss that as a personal preference, but
there's a problem with it, objectively speaking. Normally, whitespace is
collapsed in HTML and it's a moot point. But not in _WordPress_.

Now, let me pick on patio11. He uses double spacing in his articles. Not a big
deal, right? But the extra spaces causes unintended indentations in
paragraphs. I know it shouldn't bother me, but it drives me bonkers. For
example, I see it in the second paragraph here:
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-
pro...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/)

~~~
enraged_camel
Yep. For an explanation of why double-spacing is objectively wrong, read this:

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

~~~
Dru89
Isn't this the exact Slate.com article that the posted article deems
inaccurate?

~~~
tedunangst
I believe the idea is that if we ignore the fact that this article refutes
slate, we can pretend slate refutes this article.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>if we ignore the fact that this article refutes slate

You seem to be having difficulty distinguishing opinions from facts.

~~~
kbenson
I'm confused. Either you know information that makes the very specific
examples and evidence in the article, and how they purportedly refute the
slate article's claims about the source of double spacing (and thus casting
doubt based on claims made based on that), which I would like to see, or I'm
entirely unable to parse your meaning.

------
MaxGabriel
I thought the book Practical Typography made the best case by just showing an
example. Two spaces creates rivers in the text that make it look bad. The
author's proposed solution to custom-typeset to avoid this is not sustainable
(because it's sensitive to reformatting) or practical.

Judge for yourself: [http://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-
sentences.h...](http://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-
sentences.html)

~~~
DanBC
I can't see rivers in the example. Here's a screenshot.

([http://imgur.com/7zGhP9X](http://imgur.com/7zGhP9X))

~~~
alayne
There's a river starting on line two "sentences." through the period in
"habit." and down through the space to the right of "set" 'anymore." and
"practice."

~~~
ShirtlessRod
Considering that the placement of the words in the two examples is exactly the
same, the "river" is present in both.

~~~
sbuk
Nope. Visually it's not there in the first instance.

~~~
ShirtlessRod
It absolutely is. If you want to argue it's not as large, that's fine, but it
is definitely present.

[http://imgur.com/DzrFAZU](http://imgur.com/DzrFAZU)

------
habitue
If typesetting aesthetics are actually important to the document you're
creating, you should be using software like LaTeX that figures out all the
spacing for you. If you're typing up a word document for functional usage, it
doesn't matter how many spaces you put in there

(Yes, I am giving you permission to go all e.e. cummings in your emails)

~~~
alayne
I think LaTeX is overprescribed. It's great for academic papers, but a lot of
the output from canned styles I see is lacking. Don't expect to get perfect
typography if you don't understand the desired proportions between type size
and spacing (see for example Bringhurst). LaTex is difficult to use if you are
new to it or trying to do something custom.

Personally, I'd much rather use commercial software like InDesign/QuarkXPress
and never touch LaTeX again. With that software, you can manually and visually
tweak things like word spacing for particular paragraphs to solve problems
like rivers. Of course InDesign will not automatically make documents look
nice either, but it's easier to do if you know what you're trying to achieve.
This is the kind of software used for modern magazine layout.

edit: smalltalk below also posted a similar reply as I was typing this, but is
hellbanned

~~~
latk
You are correct in stating that LaTeX is no silver bullet. The clear
disadvantage of LaTeX is the tweak-recompile cycle, whereas graphical tools
have instant feedback which is more suitable for design. But for _automated_
typography (≠ design), it is still unsurpassed after all those years.

The default LaTeX styles are still way prettier and easier to read than the
random muck (12pt Times, small margins) that would be more widespread
otherwise. For scientific papers this is truly awesome, especially when the
author does not care about typography. But you are right, LaTeX is _not_ the
correct tool for _every_ job.

~~~
ijk
Now, if we can just get LaTex with instant feedback, we can approach the best
of both worlds.

~~~
arjie
On Linux, inotify, pdflatex, and evince combine in the expected way. I edit
with vim and :w and it does the work in the background. Strictly, I use a
Makefile and make, but that's not a real difference.

~~~
jholman
I keep meaning to dig into this sort of write-based build trigger, and I'm
going to grab this excuse. As I understand it, inotify is a syscall, right? Do
you have custom C code to hook it and trigger your make? What are the standard
options for command-line access to inotify? Rudimentary googling suggests
incron or watcher (not watch). Any other advice?

Hmn, how the heck did I miss all these related google results the last few
times I tried to research this. I start looking at things like libnotify and
can't help but notice while such technologies seem to be focused on other
kinds of events, they seem like they might work for this kind of file-watching
thing.

~~~
arjie
[inotify-tools]([https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-
tools/wiki](https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki)) is the stuff you
want. There's a nice utility called inotifywait in there which will block
until there's a change in a file or directory (it does recursive as well).

You can get results from as simple as this bash one-liner:

    
    
         while(true); do inotifywait --exclude '.*.swp' -e close_write dir; make; done
    

I wrote that off the top of my head so it may not work straight off, but you
get the idea.

------
keithpeter
To my considerable surprise, a convenient sample of older books on my
bookshelf tend to confirm the author's contention (year of publication order,
all London, see file names for specifics).

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/typography-
sampl...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/typography-sample-
neville-wardlock-london-1886.png)

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/typography-
sampl...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/typography-sample-
rossetti-oup-london-1913.png)

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/typography-
sampl...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/typography-sample-ae-
mcmillan-london-1920.png)

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/typography-
sampl...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/typography-sample-brod-
knopf-london-1928.png)

Oxford University Press was using single space like spacing around 1950, but I
have a travel book about Greece published in 1947 (George Allen Unwin) that
still uses a very large space after a full stop.

~~~
joe5150
You can "hide" the space added for justification better between sentences,
since most readers would notice and be distracted by too much variable space
between letters and words. That looks to be what's happening in some of these.

------
kefka
INANCIENTLATINTHEREWERENOSPACES.THEREREALLYWERENOPUNCTUATION
EITHERBUTI'MBEINGNICE.THEREWASALSONOSPACESATALLBETWEENWORDS.
BUTPEOPLECANMAKEUPCRAZYPSEUDOHISTORIESTOMAKEUPWHATEVERTHEYFE
ELTHEYMUSTBELIEVE.

And frankly, be glad we don't use the traditional caps-only run-everything-
together style of yore.

~~~
einhverfr
ACTUALLYITWASDURINGTHEREIGNOFCHARLEMAGNETHATSPACINGCAPITALIZATIONANDPUNCTUATIONWEREADDED
ASCONVENTIONSTOMANUSCRIPTWRITINGTHANKALCUINTHATSUCHTHINGSCHANGED

------
joosters
In every discipline, there are those who care _too much_ about such pointless
trivialities. I just hope that the author leaves the correct pause at the end
of every spoken sentence, too. But I pray that I am not caught up in that
conversation!

~~~
njharman
The author is railing against people who care too much. They are not
advocating double space. They are telling the self-important twits who write
Salon articles telling everyone how ignorant and stupid two spaces is to Shut
the Fuck Up. And telling the rest of us to ignore self-important twits that
care too much.

~~~
onli
Well, "self-important twits" like myself who care about issues like usability
and readability (which the author definitely does not, as evident by the black
on gray blogdesign) have the comfortable option to just "shut the fuck up" and
don't read people unwilling to deliver on the basics. He who disrespects his
readers will get no respect from me.

~~~
pygy_
Do you find it hard to read? The contrast is more than comfortable to my eyes.

~~~
onli
Hm. Now it's dark outside and just a small light on, and I have to agree, the
contrast is readable. And [http://leaverou.github.io/contrast-
ratio/#%23222-on-%23d9d9d...](http://leaverou.github.io/contrast-
ratio/#%23222-on-%23d9d9d9) agrees. It's a bit greyer though than I prefer.

------
overgard
I didn't even know this was a thing, but caring passionately how many spaces
people put after their sentences is borderline OCD. I'm going to start using
double spaces so I know who the crazy people are.

~~~
emddudley
The world needs all types of people. Would you really want someone who doesn't
care about particulars to be designing a space shuttle?

~~~
ledge
Not someone who becomes enraged when a coworker violates one of their totally
arbitrary particulars. I wouldn't want anyone designing a spaceship to have to
function in such an unhealthy work environment.

------
ronaldx
I eventually noticed that this article practices what it preaches, after
reading a few sections. The sentence-spacing is wider than the word-spacing.

I found it easy to read fluently all the way down (this is moderately unusual
for me) - with good typographic choices in line length and colour contrast
helping.

At the least, I find the author to have some credibility on this subject.

~~~
robot_
You honestly find 12pt black text on a dark grey background with a measure of
90+ characters to be easy to read?

~~~
ronaldx
Fair point; I have set a minimum point size set which also reduces the
characters per line.

Regarding black on dark grey: yes, far preferable to black on white.

------
lutusp
An alien craft slips into orbit around the earth. They intend to invade earth,
but they first want to know whether there's a point to conquering us.

One of the aliens picks up a Internet exchange on his superpowerful galactic
cyber-terminal. He turns to his companion and says, "I don't know how to tell
you this, but they're posting thousands of words discussing whether to use one
or two spaces after a period."

The ammonia drains from the other alien's face and he says, "Let's get out of
here!"

[http://www.daviddarling.info/images/ammonia_cartoon.jpg](http://www.daviddarling.info/images/ammonia_cartoon.jpg)

------
rz2k
> The “standard” of one space is maybe 60 years old at the most, with some
> publishers retaining wider spaces as a house style well into the 1950s and
> even a few in the 1960s.

This article starts off sounding like it is making an argument against
prescriptivists, then claims that older standards are more authoritative?

Why not choose _scriptio continua_ as an even more authoritative style? Or,
take a look at the quality of writing in something like _Readers Digest_ from
the 1950s, and judge whether the conversational tone is worth emulating.

Regardless, most opinions are probably influenced either by such books as _The
Mac is not a Typewriter_ or alternately by a high school typing class that was
based on a curriculum for professional secretaries. There were still high
schools into the 1990s that taught students about carbon paper.

Even if there is a lot of unmerited arrogance about using a single space after
a period, there's a lot of officiousness around a claim that two spaces after
a period is "correct". If it is a generational thing between people who went
to high school in the 70s and 80s vs 90s and 2000s, then it is also a
difference between people who were learning business correspondence compared
to people who were learning desktop publishing and web design.

~~~
theschizoidman
> Readers Digest from the 1950s ... conversational tone

Any examples available of this online? You've got me curious.

~~~
Spooky23
Check out:

[http://www.conversationagent.com/2008/01/readers-
digest.html](http://www.conversationagent.com/2008/01/readers-digest.html)

They would basically re-write/condense articles and stories to an 8th grade
reading level, but had a unique way of doing it so that it wasn't patronizing
or content free.

It was a really interesting company, they basically had capability similar to
what you find in modern advertising/CRM systems to target supplemental
publications and other items to magazine subscribers -- in the 1960's!

Nowadays it's a bunch of drivel... stories about angels, inspirational stuff,
and military themed stories aimed at old people.

------
Tloewald
The convention of a 1/3 em space between words, 2/3 after most punctuation,
and a full em space after a sentence seems great to me. And I do appreciate a
serious piece of pedantry.

------
rmrfrmrf
It doesn't really help the author's case that they only examples of extra
space after a period they have is with justified text. ALL computer software
will add extra space after periods in justified text. In flush-left text, 2
spaces after a sentence just looks bad, period.

I also like how the author manually went in and &nbsp;&nbsp; after every
period just to make a statement.

For the record, these contrarian articles bother me because I'm a creative
director and I have to put up with my underlings showing me HN articles saying
that design dogmas like "serif text is easier to read in body copy" and "2
spaces after a period is bad" are WRONG and that I'm not listening to the
"facts". The problem? They try to prove me wrong and the results look like
shit. The author here tried to prove me wrong, but the result is his
typography looks like shit. I hope they're happy!

~~~
rafcavallaro
For centuries typographers clearly thought just the opposite, so you may want
to consider the likelihood that your preferences are simply the result of
relatively inflexible automatic typesetting replacing more expensive but more
flexible manual typesetters during the mid 20th c., not some objective
standard.

------
rayiner
Double sentence spaces are still entrenched in the legal community, and I
think they have a major advantage there: they make it easier to read text with
inline citation sentences.

------
Glyptodon
I guess my question is this: Are word processing/page layout programs failing
to translate a space after a period to the modern 'em quad' equivalent?

I was under the impression that one single spaced between thins because
'smart' features in text software and with variable width fonts knew how to
make spacing variable automatically.

I always understood the "don't use two spaces" exhortation as a standard aimed
at getting people to let their software take care of things instead of
treating Word or In Design like a typewriter.

------
nn3
`sententious' is a great word. I need to start using it.

Other than that it sounds like a tale from Jonathan Swift. Big or little
endian anyone?

------
dgesang
The whole discussion is pointless because as soon as you start thinking in
spaces, linebreaks and tabs to generate whitespace between objects you're
doing it wrong! Change the font, size, weight, line height, etc. and your
layout is gone.

Just use LaTeX. Problem solved.

------
robot_
This article is very bitter and inflammatory. In my experience, people only
use two spaces after a period because thats what they were taught and are too
stubborn to change.

The main typographic case against two spaces after a period is that it breaks
up the flow of text and creates rivers inside the text block. Counter space is
the most important aspect of a typeface, and by adding two spaces after a
period you are breaking the rhythm of the text.

~~~
asveikau
> people only use two spaces after a period because thats what they were
> taught and are too stubborn to change.

Are you sure it's stubbornness that you're describing? I was taught to use 2
spaces when I was 5 or 6, and in the meantime I have been typing things for
the majority of my life. When I pound out two spaces at the end of a sentence
it's not out of pride or because I'm consciously thinking about it.

Telling me I'm "too stubborn" to write a single space is like saying I'm too
stubborn to change my handwriting or use a Dvorak layout; these things would
require conscious effort and attention to things that I am not currently
thinking about, or to change what I am writing and this would slow me down.
Or, considering how young I was taught, you might as well say I'm "too
stubborn" to stop other current habits developed at around the same time, like
bathing regularly or brushing my teeth.

Frankly if I have to please folks like you I'd rather just pipe everything I
write into sed s/\ \ /\ /g. That way I don't have to drop my productivity by
consciously thinking about spacing between sentences. OTOH, not one person has
ever mentioned this habit to me, so it must not really be a problem.

~~~
meangeme
I learned how to type when I was 10 with double spaces after periods. I
realized it looked bad/was unnecessary and now I single space. Wasn't very
hard to make the conscious effort to change it. /just saying

~~~
asveikau
Sounds like that works for you. I don't think it would work for me. Unlike
some in this thread though, I am not going to say that my preferences work for
everybody.

------
danellis
Apparently the author is so serious about this that the HTML is full of this
things like "lazy standard?&nbsp; Wow.&nbsp; Just wow."

~~~
jbri
That seems like the wrong way to do it.

The post sentence spacing was never really treated as two consecutive spaces -
conceptually, it's a single area of whitespace that is larger than the inter-
word spacing.

If you especially cared about typesetting it correctly, you'd use a single
&ensp; (or perhaps an &emsp;).

~~~
eru
And you'd get your computer to insert the m-spaces for you.

------
mgsouth
I want Jasper Fforde to write a book about this... gangs of 14th century
typographers rove the Italian cities, always ready to whip out finely-honed
copies of LaTex to impale hated rivals and defend family honour. Meanwhile,
hermit monks of the order of St. Lancaster toil away at hand-illuminated
Postscript documents...

------
raldi
What I want to know is why style guides recommend no space around a slash. To
my eye, "either / or" is much more readable than "either/or".

~~~
j_baker
Style guides are arbitrary prescriptions. Why not 2 spaces around a slash? Why
not put a space before _and_ after a period? Why not put spaces around
parenthesis instead of just before?

------
VBprogrammer
My main objection to double space fonts is that if we wanted more space we
could easily do it with the kerning tables. To physically have to type two
spaces is stupid.

~~~
Qantourisc
Agreed! This brings back bad memories of "computer teachers" letting you type
over stuff from a printed page in Word, forcing you to double-space.

------
stuartjmoore
A larger space (em-quad) is not the same as two spaces.

~~~
Dylan16807
We're talking about visuals here, so how isn't it?

~~~
pcl
An em space is the width of the letter _m_. IIRC, a normal space in most
proportional fonts is closer to the letter _n_.

It has always been my understanding that historically, typographers tended to
prefer em spaces between sentences (vs. after intra-sentence punctuation like
'Mr.' or a comma). And so, once typewriters with their fixed-width fonts came
out¹, people used a double-space at the end of a sentence to approximate an em
space.

The frustrating thing, typographically-speaking, is that the HTML approach
doesn't map to the manually-typeset process, either, since it doesn't have any
semantic knowledge about "end of sentence" vs. "random intra-sentence
punctuation" and thus treats them all the same.

(Note that this is also where we get _em dashes_ and _en dashes_ from. And
just like em spaces and en spaces, an em dash is transliterated to '\--' in
fixed-width fonts.)

¹ For all I know, the double-space trick was used with fixed-width letterpress
before the advent of typewriters. The problem seems to have more to do with
fixed-width than with typewriters.

~~~
vizeroth
The thing is that the period on a typewriter will usually be aligned towards
the previous letter, so a "period space" sequence on a typewriter will have
nearly the same amount of space as would be seen in a "period space space"
sequence on a software word processor when not using a fixed-width font. In
essence, this furthers the idea that the double space is an emulation of the
output of a typewriter, rather than supporting the idea that it's influenced
by typesetting (where in the past the space between words might have been 1/3
or 2/3 the width of the space after a period, if no other space was added
throughout the sentence for alignment).

For the most part, the article justifies simply blaming publishers for
becoming lazy, though it seems to me that they choice of spacing around
sentences is largely determined by the market for which something is being
published, and most publishers would have invested at some point in a decent
lexer that can handle enough of the burden of finding the ends of sentences to
allow the process to be largely hands-off (and allow the appearance of the
output to change fairly easily if they want to print a special or mass-market
edition later).

------
glaugh
It'd be interesting to get data on this. Thoughts on how that would work?
Something like "Take a paragraph, A|B test it on CrowdFlower/Turk with both
types of spacing, with the outcome being [?]" Speed? Being able to answer some
question at the bottom about some detail in the text? Not sure.

I guess the likely outcome would be that there's no difference. And we'd be
stuck in the same place. We'd be better off if everyone used one convention
(if multiple people edit a doc, more consistency), but there's not much of a
good way to decide on what the convention should be. I suppose that's why
these things get so religious in the first place...

------
vuldin
Double spaces are a pet peeve of mine. I remove all of them in any document I
must edit and I'm quite thorough.

------
huma
If you see two spaces, you can almost bet that the author is an American and
over 40 years old :)

~~~
nutate
I'm 34 and I do it. I wouldn't have it any other way. Why even have periods if
you aren't going to separate sentences with proper distance.

------
catenate
Unix fmt double-spaces after periods, except periods after single letters. Of
course, that's only useful to you if you compose text in a text editor, and
pipe it through fmt (or par, if you are that picky), before publishing it.

Thanks to HTML, however, you wouldn't know this text, for example, had lines
about 72 characters,¹ was carefully hand-justified after fmt(1) to leave no
dangling words alone on a line before or after punctuation,² and had double
spaces after all periods inside paragraphs, except T and S in T. S. Eliot.

¹ Except the first paragraph, better broken at “letters”, “editor”, and “it”,
and this footnote, also broken after “editor”.

² Though I would rather do that than visit violence upon decent sentences,
like this one, broke at “sentences”. Obviously it's preferable to expand and
contract margins a bit to suit the text. Nobody does this any more though,
because auto-sizing to columns destroys manual formatting.³

³ Incidentally, these footnotes had to be separate paragraphs, to keep them
from merging with the previous one, and with the body paragraphs. What a piece
of work is HTML… it delights not me.

Here is this comment before the autoformatter got to it.
[https://gist.github.com/catenate/6567903](https://gist.github.com/catenate/6567903)

------
girzel
It seems there are three different use cases. 1) Typing and storing words as
plain-text. Two spaces seem unnecessary. 2) Writing a file for pretty
printing. LaTeX is an excellect choice, and will probably make a pretty PDF.
3) Display as an HTML webpage. Currently there aren't any good solutions for
this, and generally we're trying to make something that either just defaults
to 1, or else creates a poor emulation of 2.

------
dpkendal
It may not _be_ wrong, but it still _looks_ wrong, or antiquated at the very
least. Reading a book that still uses extra space after a full stop feels like
reading something from the time when it was fashionable to put a space before
an exclamation mark or a question mark.

The period alone is enough to indicate a full stop; an extra space is
redundant. Like needless words, one should seek to omit needless punctuation
wherever possible.

~~~
rafcavallaro
yesandletsgetridofthosepeskypacesbetweenwordstoo!

------
pradocchia
Nice article and nice use of primary sources.

 _The convention was: put wider spaces than word spaces after punctuation, and
put an extra-wide space after a period._

I will try this for two weeks: three spaces after the period; two after the
comma, semi-colon and friends. Already, I note a difference. Already do I seek
alternate syntax to regulate spacing.

~~~
Groxx
Sorry if my brain is just tired and not parsing correctly, but I'm confused
about this:

> _Already do I seek alternate syntax to regulate spacing._

Do you mean you want an easier way to create such 1,2,3 spaces, or that it
makes you want 1-space-only more than before?

~~~
pradocchia
It means, when I add two spaces after a comma, I have increased its visual
strength and thus I may choose alternate syntax where I don't want a strong
break. eg, "already, I have" -> "already have I". The latter form does feel
more old fashioned. Perhaps writers of yesteryear experienced the same effect.

------
EGreg
Oh boy, I just wasted 10 mins on reading sides in a debate about typesetting
sentences.

The original author's purpose is to set the record straight about history and
counter false claims about history to back up one's points in a debate.
Period. Full stop. Space. The guy even says that repeatedly in his comments.
Get it right :)

------
nkuttler
Sigh. Cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.her...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324)

Poor Wordpress.

------
lnanek2
I vote whatever is faster to read. Wikipedia claims one study said one space
barely, other studies showed no difference. So one space it is, I guess. Don't
really care about the history whatsoever.

------
arnorhs
Arguing with a Slate article is probably the wrong place to start for this
discussion. The Wikipedia entry on sentence spacing is probably a tiny bit
better.

As much as I'd love to see a properly executed experiment where reading speed,
enjoyment and comprehension was evaluated between groups of people reading the
same material using single or double spacing after a period, I'm guessing it
ultimately it comes down to preference.

------
dnautics
If you read the original constitution, there is definitely a longer space
after periods (not too many of them not at the end of a line) than between
words.
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Constitut...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Constitution_of_the_United_States%2C_page_1.jpg)

------
meangeme
My main issue with double spacing after periods is that people rarely do it
consistently. This author, who is in favour of the double space, uses a triple
space after a question mark at one point. I always see this happen when I read
anything from "double spacers."

------
peterkelly
Wow, that's some passion there!

I find it ironic that this is the first article I've seen in a long time for
which I've had to bring up Safari's reader in order to read comfortably. Black
text on a dark-grey background? really?

~~~
robot_
I know I find it frustratingly obvious that the author has no real grasp of
typography just by looking at the text in this article.

------
stretchwithme
&nbsp; has been my friend for years. Its the only way to make the browser give
you two spaces between sentences.

Or is there some better way to do it, a setting for an entire paragraph or
page? It'd be great to have that.

~~~
lutusp
You can wrap each sentence in <span class="sentence"> ... </span>, then use
CSS to apply a style to the sentence class. This may seem complex for such an
issue, but it does obey the rule of separating content and style.

Another advantage of this approach is that you can have a JS checkbox on the
page so people who feel strongly about this can choose which style they
prefer. :)

Creating a sentence class as above does for sentences what <p> ... </p> does
for paragraphs.

------
FkZ
The author keeps mentioning that "most people", but I can't find where that
conclusion comes from.

And arguing that we should use two spaces to replicate a standard of longer
spaces is at best a crude approximation.

------
eagsalazar2
This is a hilarious debate to read on hn, a veritable shitpile of busy text.
Not complaining, I like hn, just saying it's funny. (btw, I'm firmly in the 2
space camp).

------
derefr
One space after periods, then give the period-space pair nice-looking kerning
in your typeface. Done.

~~~
minor_nitwit
Doesn't work for abbreviations.

------
bowerbird
i really love that this is one of those topics that draws scads of comments no
matter where it appears.

as if it is important, and everybody's behavior must be rigidly enforced so
we'll have complete conformity.

-bowerbird

------
CharlesW
Not sure if serious?

~~~
pmichaud
You know how we argue about stuff like bracket styles and virtually identical
text editors? Other professions have their own Very Important Debates(TM).

~~~
anon1385
Doesn't typography overlap quite significantly with web design ? Isn't that
the profession of many of the people on this site ?

Lack of knowledge of these things is one of the reasons that much of the text
people read every day is presented with a system (HTML/CSS) that has complete
disregard for typography[1]. Unlike LaTeX for example where you can set your
inter sentence spacing to whatever you want, because Knuth took the time to
learn about typography and create a system that has the flexibility required
to lay out text properly[2].

[1] smallcaps, kerning, spacing, justification, the list goes on and on

[2] for pretty much any value of 'properly' you can imagine

~~~
pfortuny
There is however a problem with interactive devices: any type-setting is
doomed because the setter has no control on the output.

Knuth could do TeX because the aim is to produce fixed-typed text (barring
proportionality). Not so on the Internet. It is not that the web standards
despise typography: it is that the web is not a place in which to SET (which
implies "fix") types. And that is why it is so hard to get a compelling,
attractive web page.

------
gregors
Two spaces is wrong.

------
ddebernardy
Sigh... Methinks the author should get a life.

Here's what should really happen: my OS should adjust tracking after periods
based on preferred locale. And the same for other typography rules.

Instead, we have broken software that can't get anyone to agree on typography,
and anal bloggers who are debating over how we should adapt to our broken
software in an age where white space is collapsed anyway courtesy of html.

