
One Space or Two?  When did this change? - iamelgringo
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/OneSpaceorTwo/OneSpaceorTwo03.html
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teej
A few weeks ago I was helping my wife apply to medical school. One school in
particular had an online application with a form to answer all the questions.
Each essay question had strict character limits.

After spending hours writing, proofing, spell checking, and character couting
the essays, my wife tried to copy/paste them into the online form. No dice -
over the character limit. She called me in to help. I tried Word => SciTE =>
form, Word => Notepad => form, and a few others. Nothing worked.

Finally, I pulled up Firebug and did a little digging. Turns out this
application was using a rich text editor that was converting any two spaces to
a space + &nbsp; thus counting two spaces as _7 characters_.

Needless to say, I did a find/replace for two spaces to one space and her
application went through fine. We haven't used two spaces since.

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geepers
Two spaces are a convention that arose when monospaced fonts were the norm.
Now that proportional fonts are the norm, it's just an artifact. CMOS deals
with professional publishing, where one space was always the norm.

~~~
wmf
_Two spaces are a convention that arose when monospaced fonts were the norm.
Now that proportional fonts are the norm, it's just an artifact._

This was my first thought as well, but why? A monospaced space is larger than
a proportional space, so if you used two monospaced spaces, maybe now you
should use three proportional spaces. Instead the space between sentences has
gotten much smaller.

~~~
puns
It's not so much the size of the space, but how tightly the letters of each
word are kerned. In a proportional font, all the letters in a word are more
tightly packed together, making each word appear as a more separated object.
This in turn makes spaces between words easier to see.

~~~
jacobolus
And depending on the typeface/typesetter, sentences might also be set with
more space after them than is normally between words, though it's quite
unlikely to be twice as much. (TeX will do this, for example.)

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gcv
A little extra space after a period in a sentence does help legibility,
especially in print. However, I completely agree it does not make sense to
manually introduce two spaces in manuscripts, and I hope two-space typists
stop doing it.

1\. Two full spaces, especially with monospaced fonts, is entirely too much,
and hurts legibility. When I say "a little extra space," I really do mean "a
little."

2\. It is the job of the typesetting or layout system or engine to properly
render sentences. A typist should focus on writing, on expressing thoughts as
well and as clearly as possible, not on dealing with layout or font kerning
bullshit.

For example, TeX, a layout engine which produces very good-looking results,
adds a little extra space after a period (full stop) TeX just cares about
whitespace, but does not count how many occurred (an exception: one or more
blank lines introduce a new paragraph). It understands the page being laid
out, and it understands the font, so it just adds the appropriate amount of
space where needed, without any extra effort from the typist. TeX also happens
to correctly handle inter-line hyphenation, which typists have no business
worrying about, either. The same applies for first-sentence-in-paragraph
indentation. Honestly, if a layout "engine" is called MS Word, or some other
WYSLLTS (What You See Looks Like Total Shit) fancy word processor, and does
not appropriately lay out documents, then that "engine" is a piece of junk.
Failing that, type however many spaces you want and hire an InDesign or Quark
Express expert to make sure everything looks as it should.

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jcl
TeX has reasonable defaults, but it is not all-knowing. A typist who cares
about the spacing of his document must memorize TeX's period-spacing rules and
carefully annotate the exceptions -- which includes both errors of too much
and too little space:

<http://john.regehr.org/latex/#little>

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mechanical_fish
I think the two-space-at-the-end habit was a typewriter thing. It's now about
as obsolete as typewriters.

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iamelgringo
Sigh... I'm getting to be an old fart.

I suppose things might have changed since I learned touch typing on my Dad's
Compaq Chameleon:
[http://www.ubertechworld.com/museum/images/Compaq_PortableI/...](http://www.ubertechworld.com/museum/images/Compaq_PortableI/compaq_portableI_5.jpg)

~~~
jharrison
I'm with you. I get razzed by a copywriting friend of mine all the time. I
learned 2 spaces in typing class and nobody ever told me the rule changed.
It's such a habit now that I have to think about using just one space.

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aston
You can't even get two spaces to display in HTML without forcing one of them
(with &nbsp;).

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tdavis
I've been using two spaces my entire life, and I'm not about to stop now! I
will occasionally use one space when writing online, but I overwhelmingly
stick with two.

~~~
lux
I've actually been working on training myself to use one space, and it's a
hard habit to change. I was taught to use two spaces by typing teachers, but
was recently given a bit of a lesson from a friend who studies typography and
designs his own fonts that the correct form is to use a single space.

Two spaces emerged as a convention for reasons mentioned in other posts here,
and typing teachers in particular seem to have jumped on that bandwagon.
However, the effect on rendered type is that it leaves unpleasant gaps in
paragraphs in most popular programs (Word, etc.), and so the correct form
according to typography professionals is apparently one space (or slightly
more, but then that becomes a rendering issue, not one for the typist to
decide). Since I have a huge appreciation for typography (albeit, not enough
knowledge of the art itself), I feel it's worth correcting my habit.

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tome
Mavis Beacon taught me two spaces. Since two spaces is syntactically
equivalent to one in the text processing software I use (mostly LaTeX), and
it's semantically meaningful, I'm going to stick to two.

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tjic
Given that emacs has a command 'forward-sentence, which depends on this, I
really really like two spaces at the end of a sentence.

~~~
yummyfajitas
From my .emacs:

    
    
        ;Sets sentence end to be .?!, but with 1-space after sentence terminator rather than 2.
        ;I have no idea why 2 spaces is the default.
        (setq sentence-end "[.?!][]\"')}]*\\($\\| $\\|	\\| \\)[ 	]*")

~~~
newt0311
You might also want

    
    
        (setq sentence-end-double-space nil)
    

in your .emacs. Its a variable used for filling defined in paragraphs.el.

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mhartl
Good typesetting systems such as (La)TeX ignore the typed spaces; instead,
they handle the situation automatically by inserting extra space after
periods, regardless of the spacing in the source text.

~~~
newt0311
Unfortunately, LaTeX is the only typesetting system I know which is accessible
to non-professional typesetters and its not very widely used. I wish MS Word
and OOo were as good. At least then people wouldn't be against paragraph
justification as they are now.

~~~
mhartl
Agreed; with modern CPUs there's just no excuse for the ugly typesetting in
Word and OpenOffice.

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bcater
I wonder how many sheets of paper it would save annually. I also wonder if we
should gzip books before they're printed.

~~~
eru
Definitely! (I just realized that gzipping your files before downloading via
the web probably does not change the data on the wire --- as most browsers and
http servers support gzip encryption transparently.)

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lallysingh
Huh, a lot of those reasons came down to "crap software."

Word, we're all looking at you.

Yup.

As for the rest, yeah, two spaces. A period's often a single pixel with 4-8
grey antialiased dots around it.

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fallentimes
I've always done one space. Why do more work?

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gazs
It's called French spacing. I learned that "it's just a weird English habit",
but the Wikipedia article is a lot more detailed:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_spacing>

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schmingle
if your sentence ends in an acronymn, it helps. i vote for the additional
spacing.

