One space after a period or two?
14I learned touch typing on a manual typewriter. We were taught two spaces following a period.
A typewriter uses a fixed spacing, where an “i” and a “w” take up the same space. The two space rule helps readers to see the sentence break better.
Today, one can have proportional spaced fonts. So arose a heretical group, who hold that one space is sufficient. These heretics are possibly influenced by a certain social media site, where only 280 characters, spaces included, are allowed.
One psychophysical study has shown that there is a slight improvement in reading speeds with two spaces. (YMMV, but unquestionably, reading speed improves if you don’t move your lips.)
I would add something that many artists know explicitly or instinctively. That is, the judicious use of negative space or ma. Ma (Japanese) refers to spare garden designs. It also works in art or in writing.
These thoughts are cast as short sentences and paragraphs and extra returns for paragraph spacing. Negative space. Plenty of ma.
Less is more.
I have also heard that one tell used to detect cheaters, who use a third party to write an essay for them, is whether or not the spacing after a period is consistent.
Or do you prefer:
I learned touch typing on a manual typewriter. We were taught two spaces following a period. A typewriter uses a fixed spacing, where an “i” and a “w” take up the same space. he two space rule helps readers to see the sentence break better.Today, one can have proportional spaced fonts. So arose a heretical group, who hold that one space is sufficient. These heretics are possibly influenced by a certain social media site, where only 280 characters, spaces included, are allowed. One psychophysical study has shown that there is a slight improvement in reading speeds with two spaces. (YMMV, but unquestionably, reading speed improves if you don’t move your lips.) I would add something that many artists know explicitly or instinctively. That is, the judicious use of negative space or ma. Ma (Japanese) refers to spare garden designs. It also works in art or in writing. These thoughts are cast as short sentences and paragraphs and extra returns for paragraph spacing. No negative space. No ma. Less is more. I have also heard that one tell used to detect cheaters, who use a third party to write an essay for them, is whether or not the spacing after a period is consistent.
So are you a one space or two kind of person?
- 46 comments, 70 replies
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Meh.com automatically edits down to one space if the user types two.
I slightly prefer two spaces. But I don’t intend to try to control this aspect of the universe.
/image rock garden 2
Professional editors and copy editors? Pls comment.
@f00l not an editor, just a web dev, and I’ll chime in to say that a lot of the internet removes extra spaces because html truncates them unless explicitly saving an additional space character as ’ ’ . A space takes up one byte. An extra space takes up 6 more.
And if you’ve ever seen someone try to pad a comment with white space in a digital format, it looks like this:
My old habits remain to this day.
@narfcake I thought type class in jr. high was the biggest waste of time ever.
Until it suddenly wasn’t, about 6 years later, when the Apple ][ dropped into my life.
@blaineg @narfcake Right? I managed to skip typing because it was a class they funneled people who couldn’t do math into, and -I- could do math.
Dammit.
I used to use two spaces. Now whatever software I’m typing in spaces properly so single spaces are appropriate. I haven’t double spaced in many, many years.
I prefer more than one Bernie when the site allows.
i was taught the two space rule as well, but have adjusted. mostly because i thought extra spaces in digital text like this were removed automatically.
your example isn’t possible to compare given the italics, so let’s try a more direct one here and see:
a test. of spaces.
a test. of spaces.
yes, see, it doesn’t matter if you use two spaces or one. but some still type the second space anyway just out of habit.
i haven’t typed full sentences* for print in a very long time, so for me it would depend on the font and, likely more importantly, the style book of whoever i was working for.
(*i am a print designer but all of my more recent work has been in nightclub flyers, so paragraphs aren’t on the menu. it’s been quite awhile since i last worked in publishing. i’m with you on gratuitous negative space, though. definitely.)
Two spaces, now get off my lawn
/giphy giggle
I originally learned with two spaces but have adapted to the times and converted to one with the advent of proportional fonts. (This old dog can learn new tricks!
)
/giphy two
I prefer two but have gotten used to one; I also prefer serif fonts, but that seems to be a losing battle too.
Fascinating! I also learned using two spaces but have changed my ways. I thought that would be less common, but that appears to be a change people are willing to make. Generally speaking, I am orthographically conservative (and opinionated!) but one space stopped bugging me, I guess.
@mschuette Think of all the “intentionally left blank” pages the extra unused spaces will accommodate!
The world has changed, Mehtizens…
https://grammarist.com/style/spaces-between-sentences/
“The old typographical superstition that it’s proper to use two spaces after a sentence should be laid to rest. Virtually every major style guide recommends a single space, and most major publishers and publications comply. If you don’t believe us, take any book off the shelf or visit any editorially scrupulous website and look closely at the spacing. Chances are good you will find no double spaces between sentences…”
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/OneSpaceorTwo.html
"Q. I recognize all writing formats today say there is to be one space between the period of a sentence and the first letter of the next sentence. I believe this fails to take into account studies that refer to visual cues that assist the reading process. So I start here with you to request this be fully discussed and reviewed with the hope that we may at minimum note that two spaces are acceptable between sentences. Thank you for your consideration of this matter.
A. I’m so sorry to report that that ship sailed long ago. You are a lone voice, crying in the wilderness. Too little, too late; a bolted horse, a dollar short. No metaphor can express how hopeless this is. Our best advice to you is to look for a silver lining in the single space."
@shahnm So glad the Chicago Manual of Style updated their rules on punctuation. I had almost dismissed the manual as a period piece.
@mehcuda67 I see what you did there…
Another lone voice crying in the wilderness - two spaces, please.
Whoneedsspaceswhentoday’sconversationsarealljustyolothisandidkthatbytexts?
KuoH
@kuoh I know people who talk that way; they drive me nuts.
@kuoh @Kyeh I talk that way!!
@kuoh @tinamarie1974 UH OH!
So do some of my friends, and my supervisor at work!
@kuoh @Kyeh @tinamarie1974
That’s what the romans did 2K yrs ago!
Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.
But I still prefer 2 spaces and serif fonts.
I had to retrain myself to type two spaces, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to re-condition.
/giphy four lights
@brainmist The random /giphy has failed me, so
Two spaces are just so natural (and I do a LOT of typing) that I don’t even think about it. I have even intended to single-space for a specific text and when I am done I look back and find maybe 10% of the sentences have a single space. I get what you mean about proportional fonts, but right is right! And it is backed the only actual scientific study of the issue (well, that I know of…)
Are two spaces better than one? The effect of spacing following periods and commas during reading
https://rdcu.be/cd8Dq
I mean there’s a chart! It HAS to be right!
And don’t even get me started on the Oxford comma…it’s grammatically correct, aesthetically pleasing, and linguistically clarifying.
/image duck and cover
@ybmuG WAIT.
What. THE HELL. Is this “1 space following periods, 2 spaces following commas” blasphemy??
Was this sheerly for test purposes? Does anyone actually do this?
And I concur on the Oxford comma, although not so exemplarily.
@brainmist Yes - the permutations were purely for experimental purposes. I actually had never heard of two spaces after a comma, but apparently that was a thing as well.
@ybmuG I figured it HAD to be, but also my brain broke a little just thinking about it.
@ybmuG I disagree about the Oxford comma, it’s not grammatically correct, aesthetically pleasing nor linguistically clarifying.
@densa ISWYDT!
@densa
I disagree, disagree, and disa-greediate.
@ybmuG Surely you meant: duck, and cover?
@blaineg well played
Where the is the option for justified text?
What’s your justification for its use/non-use?
@mike808 Ahhh, I remember the heady days of justified text, of never having to figure out where to break you sentence for the next line…
O f l i n e s t h a t l o o k e d l i k e t h i s
infortuitously, because the next word was so long it’d squish them if included…
And then we all kinda said “You know what, maybe let’s just do left-aligned and let the words fall where they may”.
@brainmist Or, you could figure out hyphenation and have your document look professionally typeset.
Unfortunately, overly simplistic/immature/unsophisticated tools have broken spell-checkers that don’t skip/ignore soft hyphens, as opposed to hard hyphens like the one in spell-checkers. Hyphens have hard and soft versions, just like spaces and tabs. And it looks like browsers treat ‘/’ as a regular character and does not break a line on the ‘/’. Before or after is another tough call as well.
There are critical distinctions between publishing tools like Calibre or Tek and word processors like LibreOffice (an open-source no-cost alternative to Microsoft Word). Calibre and Tek are also open source and no-cost.
@mike808 At the point at which the standard has become the adaptation to the tech at hand, there’s not much impetus to change to something more similar to an older standard, because now that’s visually less appealing.
So, what you’re really talking about is the use of a non-breaking space following a terminal punctuation mark.
Or are you saying that only after a period is two spaces required?
What about:
Digital media is not the same as print media. And don’t start on color gamuts and RGB vs CMYK.
Let’s throw in what to do about colons, semi-colons, slashes, closing parenthesis, braces, or brackets, ¶, ™, and other sigils.
Two spaces, always and forever.
T W O spaces. I am not changing my two space rule. I two-spaced this, not that anyone in charge of this digital world cares. My second spaces will be removed automatically. A pox on that, I say.
I agree, negative space, especially in a long document, is imperative to give the eyes a rest.
Oxford commas are a necessity in my world.
Whatever my wife says.
Two spaces. Always two spaces on the input side. Regardless of what a site/software chooses to do with them.
New paragraphs have become scarce for too many online commenters, rendering their comments TL;DR.. That extra space is a form of protest.
@RedOak I agree
New paragraphs are even more of a reading aid than two spaces at the end of a sentence.
Two spaces, please.
I took typing and stenography courses in High School in the early 1970’s. Technically here is what you are Supposed to do which is:
After a semi-colon or comma 1 SPACE. After a colon or after a period 2 spaces. On a typewriter be it a Manual Or Electric typewriter it looks proper to type 2 spaces after the colon or period at the end of a sentence. I’ve found that typing on a computer it looks a little strange to type 2 spaces. And now because computers automatically put only 1 space after a period. So it’s pretty much that we’ve all gotten used to seeing what the computers automatically are programmed to do which is space out 1 space after typing be it a period, comma, semi-colon or colon.
I will proudly represent the minority here - I have always preferred one space. I really think this is a generational shift as I’m 36 and learned to touch type on a computer in the late 90s.
I take offense at the notion that Twitter has influenced my choice. I’ve always used full words with proper punctuation, even back in my T9 texting days.
@die13lda
Ah, T9.
When texting took skill. . . Sort of.
I span generations. I don’t use twitter and never have. I read in some style guide once that it’s all ball bearings and single spacing after periods these days, and I just conformed. I passively encourage others to do the same, in that I don’t give a fuck either way what you do with your spacing after periods. There is apparently serenity in conceding this one point to the inevitable march of time and convention. Other than that though, fight the man, fuckers!
@shahnm
This is epitome of “Meh.”
Spacing after a period is the least of our worries.
Choose your battles.
Two spaces at the end of each sentence (period, question mark, exclamation, etc), but only when using a typewriter. When software is automatically formatting with proportional text, the extra space is just a waste of time & energy.
Two spaces to catch cheaters? Since when? I teach and have a number of ways I catch cheaters but that isn’t one of them. How many spaces people use is so totally random. I’d say off hand older students are more likely to use 2 and younger ones are more likely to use 1 but that, I’d guess, is typewriter vs computer era when learning how to type.
@Kidsandliz
It is/was only good for assignments based on character/word count.
Mainly when you’re cutting it close and didn’t want to just add fluff/filler sentences (We’d get dinged for superfluous info.)
I’m 37 so tech (Word/Works/Word Perfect) was different then vs now.
As an aside, I’ve seen the draconian online testing programs out now and am seriously disgusted by them.
@robthedude05 I’ve done word counts on assignments before but not character counts. The bigger issues is making it appear longer by using white type. Nope. I select all on docs where the assignment has a word count and choose black for the type color. Amazing what can come up with some students (actually not all that many though).
I started out pretty naive to cheating since I never had done so. Sadly I learned a lot over the years.
@Kidsandliz i learned on a computer and it was still two spaces back then. but it was before the internet truly took off, and certainly before social media.
actually for most of my school years i would hand write reports and when teachers started asking for them to be typed, my mom would type it up for me at work since we didn’t have a home PC yet. (just a “terminal” as we called it so she could access work from home occasionally.)
anyway, when i did start typing my own papers, i remember teachers pretty quickly started specifying the font, font size, and whether it was to be single or double spaced. (between lines, not referring to periods.) because they had you meet a page count not a word count, so kids got “creative” pretty fast to meet that, lol! or we just went hog wild choosing fonts we thought were “cool” but potentially hard to read!
@jerk_nugget LOL I shaved 25 pages off my dissertation by removing one line of leading and moved the margins by as little as I possibly could move it which saved money with all the copies on archival paper I had to print. Of course my committee got the “normal” double spaced, normal margins as I suspected if my dissertation appeared “too short” they’d make me write more just on principle of how could you write a good shorter dissertation (I had two jerks on the committee who had a reputation of requiring re-writes just because you hadn’t done enough of them so I am pretty sure short but identical would have triggered “jerk”) LOL.
With regular 12 point, double space, normal margins you get roughly 250 words per page. Due to all these tricks (add or subtract leading, font size 11 or 13 and not 12, change margins slightly…) I go with word count. Then I don’t need to check margins, spacing, etc. I give a range of max and min though as that gives students a rough guide for depth of detail required and keeps me from having to read papers a zillion pages long that ramble on and on. I also tell them if it is longer than the max I stop reading at the last countable word so ramble on at your own risk.
And since I now require all papers uploaded into whatever LMS we are required to use and keep the gradebook in, I have them run through turnitin. And as I said before I select all, make the type black to catch characters/words in white type when I check word count, I change to New Times Roman if something doesn’t look right (plagiarism checkers can be defeated by substituting similar looking letters for the one intended - good grief if they’d just rewrite it in their copy/paste in their own words and cite they’d save time), outlaw pdf files and so they have to be in word because you can’t check as easily with pdf files. Incidentally three to 5 words in a row that are highlighted by turnitin (or safe assignment or whatever) is usually ignored by faculty - especially if they are common phrases, technical stuff common in the field, etc.Those programs are not perfect.
All that is about a 1/2 hour of PITA to do to that for an assignment, but it isn’t fair to students who follow the rules, don’t cheat, etc. not to make an effort to catch and penalize those who break rules and cheat.
@Kidsandliz i had a buttwad like that both as a prof and as a panelist at my exit panel you needed to pass to graduate. the universe really aligned to dick me over with that one - the exit panel was supposed to be comprised of total strangers, and instead i got the one prof i didn’t get on with. this was a result of my department chair coincidentally choosing my senior year to go on sabbatical, leaving me with a very flighty and not particularly administrative minded prof as his interim replacement. she didn’t catch that this guy should have been removed from my panel, and in effect he sat on said panel and immediately poisoned all three other panelists against me. she apologized and they passed me so i could graduate, but it was a miserable day.
this guy didn’t like anyone to have original ideas, or to get anything “right” on the first try. so instead of giving us original assignments, he gave us projects he had already completed in his personal life and presented them as original assignments. only, if you didn’t come up with his solution, the best he’d give you was a C. but you were welcome to re-do the project indefinitely…until you came up with his solution in which case you got an A. but i refused to play his game, not having time to waste copying bad work and not giving a f*^&$#@ if i got a low grade because it was an elective and i thought i’d never see this dude again. HA! joke was on me for sure with that one…
anyway!
glad you take the extra time to ensure fairness - as a former student i can say that’s something that would definitely be appreciated. it does amaze me too the lengths some people will go to to cheat when it would have been easier and more worthwhile to simply do the assignment. go figure!
nice at least to have the tools now - back then when i was turning in papers it was print only so if you wanted to know how many words something was…you’d better get out something to point with and start counting lol! same for checking for plagiarism. (however, NOT implying in any way, shape, or form that teachers these days have it easy! definitely one of the toughest and often most thankless jobs but one of the most necessary.)
@Kidsandliz What is “white type”?
@Kyeh Chose font color as white. It then is invisible on the page.
@Kidsandliz So they’d stick in random extra invisible words or something?
@Kidsandliz @Kyeh
yep… pretty devious!
@chienfou @Kyeh Yeah they do it to make it look like an otherwise too short document is longer if checking length by word count.
And I don’t care about the one or two space issue with student papers. I care more about citations (and no wikipedia is not an acceptable cite as 1/3 of the pages have mistakes on them), plagiarism, grammar that is out of control and so sounds unprofessional, clarity of expression, quality of ideas and support for them blah blah blah.
@Kidsandliz @robthedude05 that’s… That’s so devious!
Honestly, I feel like the cheaters almost work harder. Almost.
One of my favorite MS Word quirks is when it reports this document has “approximately” so many words. What you mean “approximately”? You’re the computer!
2 even Opus agree with me. Yes I know it shows my age.
I just force 2 spaces after the period. Mostly because I can and because I have reached an age where I want it the “right” way. Not sure how others handle single spaces after the “.” themselves, I am sure it keeps them up at night.
@tightwad I completely agree!! you can come over and help me yell at people to stay off my grass!!!
@tinamarie1974 You agreed with me, but you didn’t include the extra space in your agreement? I am disappointed! I am sure you will learn from this however and do better in the future! Don’t let the man tell you how many spaces you can have!
@tightwad oh man, they must have auto-corrected. Rest assured TWO spaces were entered. They are watching us
@tightwad @tinamarie1974 Two spaces are awesome.
POPSOCKETS! SPA KITS! POLLY POCKETS! AWESOME!
Two. On my phone, two spaces is the way to tell it to put in a period and start a new sentence. But it only puts one of the spaces in. No way I’m going back and putting the space back in there on every sentence.
But when I’m typing on a real keyboard and using the period key, it’s two spaces. And an Oxford comma. Every time.
Related: your phone probably puts a period in for you if you just do two spaces.
@djslack exactly. So in other words, two spaces.
I guess, with this thread, we must finally have discussed every possible subject.
/giphy Space, the Final Frontier
@mehcuda67
But what is inside the space?
And is there one or two of them?
@mehcuda67 @mike808 And what is beyond the edge of space?
@mehcuda67
@Kidsandliz @mehcuda67 @mike808 Beyond the rim?
Microsoft’s Bill Hill (RIP) put it best: https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-There-is-only-one-space-after-a-period
There are several typing / formatting styles used in academia and over time the rules for those styles have changed.
When I was in grad school, and during my short foray into higher education, APA format was what was used. In some editions, 2 spaces have been required. In others a single space.
Also back before you could download templates that were supposedly accurate, a certain part of your grade on papers was for following format. I can remember having to mark down students who used 2 spaces instead of one and would say but that is how xxx formatted it. My response was always - you can use whatever software you want, but you are responsible to know if it is wrong. Having learned to do this all on a typewriter, electric at least, not manual, I would always snicker at the crutch myself.
I spent a lot more time on the edition that used the single space and so that is how I type today. I generally find 2 spaces looks weird as a result. (It’s also why I have gotten used to using MSWord with the formatting characters visible (that and what I say next.))
(I also remember having to ‘fix’ documents my former boss typed because there would sometimes be 1 sometimes 2 and sometimes even 3 spaces between sentences or even words.
Now a days, I don’t think it matters - as long as you are consistent in how you type.
Tell us about the folks that keep adding spaces to make the line wrap?
One space after the period unless you happen to be using a typewriter.
I grew up learning to type on a typewriter, so learned two spaces, but when computers started adjusting fonts to nullify the need for two spaces, I adjusted. That’s what mature people do - they adjust and adapt to changing circumstances. Immature people cling to what they know and stubbornly refuse to grow and learn. Anyone who’s militant about double spacing probably has a lot of other beliefs that are equally outmoded.
This is a “problem” that will ultimately fix itself via generational turnover, so complain about it while you can.
@KENSAI Please exit the grassy area adjacent to my abode.
@KENSAI
I hope to hell I don’t have to ‘adapt’ (aka dumb down) to the informal, correct spelling is optional, style that texting has fostered. It is obvious that the first person cut from the payroll at the newspaper is always the proofreader!
@chienfou I agree with you.
Spelling matters. Grammar matters. They both foster effective communication.
An extra space after a period doesn’t.
@KENSAI
Understood. 2 spaces will not make or break my day. The assault on the language… that bothers me, and I am not planning to adapt to that changing circumstance though it certainly seems we are headed that way.
@chienfou @KENSAI Our son tries to convince us that something isn’t bad English if that is how it is commonly used. Recognizing that language does evolve and no one would agree that the way we spoke 200 years ago should be the only acceptable manner today, but just because some knuckleheads can’t seem to speak coherently doesn’t mean that such speech should be considered the norm.
You know, the more I think about it, sure - I’ll accept his premise and start a trend to use King James English. Thou hast been warned.
@KENSAI @ybmuG
Thank ye!
@KENSAI Change isn’t always a good thing.
@chienfou @KENSAI @ybmuG
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
James Nicoll
I type two spaces after a terminating punctuation, even though I realize that most software removes the second space. At this point, its just muscle memory, and the time it would take to slow down and force my brain to not type two spaces would be more time-consuming than to just let it flow naturally.
When I first married, I had a PC, but they were not common place in every household. My wife was a night owl and still attending college and would often be writing papers deep into the night. She was still used to a typewriter, and accustomed to hitting the return lever, which required some amount of force on manual typewriters. When she would get to the end of a paragraph, she would smack the living crap out of the return key twice, mimicking the force necessary for the return lever. BAM! BAM! It would never fail to jolt me wide awake. A few minutes of gentle clicking I was almost asleep again, and then BAM! BAM! Return keys were even over-sized in those days, and facilitated this approach.
I miss having a Selectric.
No use for one now, it’s just a nostalgic thing; but I did love them.
/image selectric
Also had a liking for those portable typewriters used by foreign correspondents.
/image portable typewriter
@f00l I think I still have a Selectric somewhere…Also have an AT&T portable (early electronic) but I think we sold it. Just found a cartridge for it recently, though.
@f00l I still run into rare occasions it would be nice to have a Selectric to put an address on an envelope. I can do that with a printer, but I do it so seldom, I almost always waste at least one envelope (often more) trying to get things aligned properly.
@DrWorm
Envelopes are the only practical reason I’d have for owninv a typewriter. And I mail so rarely …
@DrWorm @f00l
At least the keys never got bunched up. If that had been the original design, the QWERTY keyboard would have been quite different.
@f00l for $60 you can have one again…
@ybmuG
The free household space for it could be more costly to arrange than the typewriter would be to purchase : )
@DrWorm @f00l It’s overkill, but MS Word does a great job with envelopes.
@blaineg @f00l MS Word won’t tell me whether my printer needs the manual feed of the envelope to be face up for face down or top first or bottom first. I do it so seldom, I can never remember.
I leaned the two spacing but in college was told for papers to go with one space so that’s how I type now. Although I do sometime do two as a form of habit.
I know when I type on a computer I still use 2 just out of habit. Plus I think it looks right. On mobile I don’t really think about it. But I know if I type 2 spaces it automatically puts is a ‘“.” for me, and that’s nice. I never really took any real typing classes and very few computer classes. But I’m sure when we did have little typing tests on the ancient Apple computers (that we backed up on 5” floppies) in middle school that we were taught 2 spaces. I also remember we learned how to cheat on it. If you filled the whole thing with spaces, when you got to the end it would stop the timer. Then you could back up and type the sentence and it would register having the correct letters, but with the fast time from typing all spaces. The ‘class’ pretty much consisted of the timed typing, “drawing” by filling in pixels in an xy type format, and playing Oregon Trail (it was new back then).
Here is the thing I think that got missed. When you type with certain legacy fonts, they were made to replicate as best as possible the word processors and typewriters of yore( I say, having learned to type on a mechanical beast my grandmother used as a secretary during WWII). An example of this type font is Courier.
Meanwhile, a large sampling of other fonts follow proportional spacing for the most part. This was somewhat mentioned in the original comment, but missed this part of it, that there exist both monospaced and proportional spaced fonts, though on computers and other tech proportional spacing is more common.
But here is where it gets funky. If you were to type a sentence in say, Microsoft Word, there are myriad formatting options. If you type a paragraph in the same point font, but in a monospaced and proportional spaced font, you will notice that the spacing is identical, and the proportional font is set out the same as the monospaced font. The only difference is not visual at all, but one of backwards compatibility and file size. A document with dual spaces after periods will be slightly larger in size, but will also look correct when you convert it to a monospaced font, which makes it slightly worse from a file size perspective(but not enough to really matter on a modern PC), but slightly better from a formatting flexibility standpoint. The other thing that can play in is the use of justified text versus left or right aligned text, as these things also tinker with word spacing, and a justified text, while slightly different than a monospaced font, does cause a bit of the same effect, though the double spacing seems to get eaten up to some extent depending where the period occurs in relation to the end of the line.
So it is kind of a matter of preference, and unless you are tinkering with older fonts or the like, it doesn’t matter a whole lot, with many websites automatically truncating white space to save on file size anyway, which truly guarantees the typing is identical.
Mad when a librarian balked at me that I didn’t know about single spacing. Um it’s double and always been double bitch! apparently there’s this new messed up universe where there is only one space
This book set the record straight in 1989: one space.
The Mac is Not a Typewriter
Why would you put one space after 2 periods??
@chienfou What…
@chienfou See that? There’s the decline of western civilization! I put two periods, and mediocrebot “corrected” it to three.
@blaineg
read it as: One space after (a period or two)
/youtube space the final frontier
They don’t even mention full stops. : )