Space After Periods (1993)

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/

by susam • 3 years ago

184 161 3 years ago

1997.webhistory.org

Groxx• 3 years ago

Here's your annual reminder that anyone that says X decision is wrong is wrong, and has been for something like 150+ years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing

There has never been consistency here. Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want.

And don't consider web tech to be a typographical decision, it's just the only technically feasible option if you want to make something whitespace-amount-agnostic so people can indent their html.

robnado• 3 years ago

I used to put two spaces after sentences because people told me it is the correct thing to do. Now I put one space after a sentence because different people told me it is the correct thing to do. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

mannykannot2• 3 years ago

Bravo! I like your subtle sense of humor - i.e. not so subtle that it goes right over my head, but barely.

skipkey• 3 years ago

For years, I kept my wifi with the passphrase “This is my passphrase. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Without the quotes of course. With two spaces after the period.

At this point I am not going to overcome forty years of muscle memory. I assume whatever tool is doing the rendering will make things right according to the current convention.

kortex2• 3 years ago

When in Rome, do as the Romans do

IOVMEANISOVLDRITELIKEDIS?

sjoerger• 3 years ago

“Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want.”

I believe this is why I see an increasing lack of punctuation or capitalization in online discourse.

ultrarunner• 3 years ago

I’m told it’s because the period is considered passive-aggressive. I assume it’s too formal final; maybe The Kids These Days hold out hope that a sentence might not really be over? At any rate whoever got the McDonald’s account embraces it wholeheartedly.

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

You would be surprised by how often people ignore those on their verbal discourse.

Narishma• 3 years ago

Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want.

I prefer tabs to spaces myself.

kstrauser• 3 years ago

Off the island with ya.

kmoser2• 3 years ago

Yes, but do your tabs indent by two, four or eight spaces?

assimpleaspossi• 3 years ago

And so it begins...

quotemstr• 3 years ago

I usually use two spaces after the end of a sentence because doing so helps my text editor distinguish sentence boundaries from abbreviations.

taeric2• 3 years ago

I thought I was specifically taught that this is why you do two spaces. It isn't that you need two spaces after a sentence, per se; but the system has an easier time knowing to do inter sentence spacing instead of title if you do that.

That is, Dr. Smith should have less spacing. I'm guessing there are so few things that that applies to, that most systems that care can just hardcode it nowadays?

Further, I thought any typesetting system would play with the spaces after words to make things pleasant. That is, a space isn't a set width in any typeset thing. That really only became a thing with typewriters.

thristian• 3 years ago

The other day I discovered a font called Elstob that has an "Old-style punctuation spacing" mode that (among other things) adds significantly more space between sentences:

https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/

The documentation for that feature says[1]:

When Spacing is set to 1, the spacing between words and sentences and around punctuation marks is a good match for most books printed in the late eighteenth century.

[1] https://github.com/psb1558/Elstob-font/blob/c9af23d3cbadf111...

Nifty3929• 3 years ago

I would like to see a greater tolerance for different preferences. I like one space, but totally fine for some people to use two spaces.

It’s not their problem if I stab my eyes out with a pencil when I see two spaces.

throwawaymaths• 3 years ago

Imagine having not just two spaces but a whole damn line to emphasize the pauses in text:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of...

If two spaces causes you to stab your eyes for this I demand no less than seppuku

GavinMcG2• 3 years ago

That seems like an unfortunate tool to have discarded. Right now, I can use vertical separation to structure text, but horizontal separation.... Well, that's far more limited.

Within sentences, there's the dash—either em or space-en-space, depending on where you're from—and there are plenty of other structural options. Between sentences, you've got the ellipsis, and that's it. The way they're used in the Declaration, in place of paragraph breaks, is helpful even when you're not just trying to save space—for example, to structure a list of short words or phrases without creating the visual separation from the text that comes with using separate lines.

wrycoder• 3 years ago

Fully justified text must drive you insane!

unsignedint2• 3 years ago

I have no issues with people exercising their personal choices when it comes to the number of spaces after a period. However, I found it to be quite annoying when they began complaining about my preference for a single space and asserting that their method of using two spaces is more correct than mine. Ultimately, I've come to the realization that this is more akin to a matter of personal belief rather than a technicality. It seems nearly impossible to bridge the gap and find a consensus on this issue.

yellowapple4• 3 years ago

My issue with single-space is that it turns programmatically parsing out sentences from "pretty simple regex on terminating punctuation + (two spaces OR newline)" to "tangled mess of heuristics and corner-cases".

Obviously humans can figure this out easily, so I don't really notice or care if I'm reading something with single-spaced sentences, and it's pretty rare that I need to parse sentences... but the moment that need does arise, I'm gonna end up judging the hell out of that "personal choice" - to say the least.

EarthLaunch• 3 years ago

Edit: -

nostrebored• 3 years ago

in many contexts punctuation is as unnecessary as an extra space between sentences

nomel3• 3 years ago

iwouldclaimthatspacesandpunctuationareneverneededandcomprehensionismoreaproblemofpracticeratherthanability

lolinder2• 3 years ago

This is a continuation of a discussion on a different page about spaces and tabs in HTML documents [0]. It's actually a much more interesting discussion than this title and the tail end of this conversation would indicate, hinging on a disagreement over whether white space has semantic meaning or is purely presentational.

Terry Allen from O'Reilly argues that white space is significant to the meaning of the text and therefore needs first-class support in HTML, even outside of PRE. Others emphatically consider white space to be a formatting issue that has no place in HTML, which they feel should be entirely presentation-agnostic.

Interestingly, a couple of times people mention the possibility of building in support for TeX and other markup languages to fill the need for precisely-formatted documents. Specifying the presentation of HTML in a separate file (what we know as CSS) doesn't appear to be on anyone's radar yet. I wonder what the web would look like today if that had been the route we took.

[0] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/index.h...

PaulDavisThe1st• 3 years ago

I actually added a DVI (TeX) renderer to Mosaic in 1993 (while working at US CS&E). NCSA/Marc wasn't interested in the patch. If the server said the document was MIME typed <the correct type for DVI>, the regular page renderer was bypassed and code that I ripped from ... not sure where ... drew into the browser instead.

lisper9• 3 years ago

Howcananyonearguethatwhitespacehasnosemanticsignificance?

Zamiel_Snawley• 3 years ago

Funnily enough, I can still understand your message without white space, it is just harder to parse. Doesn't that undercut your statement?

patrec• 3 years ago

Fortran programmers can!

mproud• 3 years ago

No big deal, just some random Marc Andreeson and Tim Berners-Lee comments…

kmoser2• 3 years ago

Plus some rando named Guido van Rossum.

aj7• 3 years ago

Twitter killed two spaces.

DanielKehoe2• 3 years ago

I'm Daniel Kehoe, and I participated in the brief www-talk "Space after Periods" discussion thirty years ago (as Daniel Miles Kehoe).

I wrote a blog post three years ago, "Personal History: Punctuating the Web (1993)," that offers more context and perspective on the discussion [0].

We discussed this on Hacker News three years ago when Microsoft Word began flagging double spaces after a period as errors [1].

That brief discussion thirty years ago still seems to arouse strong feelings for people.

Today, looking back, I'm mostly amused that Guido van Rossum (the developer of the Python programming language) wanted web browsers to collapse multiple spaces to a single space after periods. Python, notably among programming languages, treats whitespace as significant.

[0] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-t...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22975299

fsckboy• 3 years ago

I heard about this issue back in the 80's talking to a friend doing an early WYSIWYG word processor development project. Typeset, proportional spaced, yes, same spacing between sentences and words, and if you eyeball typeset books from the precomputer era, that's what you will see.

I also looked it up in Chicago Manual of Style, and one thing I remember is, you want to get your hands on an earlier edition (for geek fun) because they have much more detail about typesetting than they do in later editions. (I don't know what the edition sweetspot is but I found a 1930's copy and I liked it)

mostly amused that Guido van Rossum...wanted web browsers to collapse multiple spaces to a single space...Python...treats whitespace as significant.

this is actually pretty funny, thank you

GoofballJones• 3 years ago

I learned to type on typewriters in the late 70s. I was thrown in a typing class in high-school and I thought to myself "this is a useless class, I'm NEVER going to ever need this". Turns out it was one of the best things I learned in high-school.

Anyway, I never used double spaces after periods. My typing teacher would always give me grief for it, but for whatever reason, I just never did it. As you can see, I still don't.

cantSpellSober2• 3 years ago

the developer of the Python programming language wanted web browsers to collapse multiple spaces to a single space

Those would be trailing spaces, not the whitespace Python considers significant (indentation).

lolinder2• 3 years ago

Indentation was very much included in the discussion, but you have to go back to the q2 page:

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/index.h...

slowwriter4• 3 years ago

To be fair, HTML treating all whitespace as insignificant was absolutely the right call

cxr6• 3 years ago

It doesn't treat all whitespace as insignificant. It does, by default (for contexts where `white-space: normal` is in play) collapse how sequences are displayed—namely, that they appear just as if a single space had been used.

moffkalast• 3 years ago

Was it? It continues to be one of the most annoying "features" and everything has to be padded with   instead to get proper alignment.

thaumasiotes2• 3 years ago

looking back, I'm mostly amused that Guido van Rossum (the developer of the Python programming language) wanted web browsers to collapse multiple spaces to a single space after periods. Python, notably among programming languages, treats whitespace as significant.

It does so by collapsing any amount of space into single INDENT and DEDENT tokens, so I'm not sure what the irony is supposed to be. If the last line started with 8 spaces, Python will not distinguish between the next line starting with 10 spaces and the next line starting with 50.

simiones• 3 years ago

It's a bit funny because it's actually hard to represent Python code in regular HTML, exactly because of this collapsing.

For example, here is some Python code typed correctly in the comment box but rendered without the code formatting support (using a | at beginning of line to prevent the code formatting to kick in):

|def foo(flag):

| if flag:

| print("this is indented")

| print("is this?")

If you check the HTML, it looks like this:

  <p>|def foo(flag):</p>
  <p>|    if flag:</p>
  <p>|       print("this is indented")</p>
  <p>|    print("is this?")</p>

pwdisswordfishc• 3 years ago

Have you ever seen a nested control structure?

BeetleB• 3 years ago

If the last line started with 8 spaces, Python will not distinguish between the next line starting with 10 spaces and the next line starting with 50.

Perhaps I misunderstood your comment, but this is quite wrong. If I have a block that's indented at 8 spaces, and the next line is 10 spaces, but should be in the same block, it will definitely throw an IndentationError.

vintagedave4• 3 years ago

Guido van Rossum writing:

I think it's mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff) that makes people want this.
Let's keep HTML simple!

was unexpected. Knuth as propaganda!

The discussion noted some O’Reilly books sentence-spaced, and layout software had different levels of support with TeX notably supporting it. And that’s the key: it’s a typographical layout choice. For document input, for writers, it’s a matter of markup for the output typographical layout not double-spacing per se. It’s an aesthetic choice only, similar to the spacing we add between letters, around punctuation etc.

So the question is not, should we support double spacing, but: should we support this sentence spacing typographical technique?

Because double spaces are an hack used to achieve layout they should not be necessary, but word processors not supporting it leads to people implementing it themselves. (If you’re a product manager, this is the sort of thing you spot to indicate a missing feature.)

It gets worse on the web: because most white space is collapsed together the double-space trick doesn’t work, and it’s _very_ hard to do in CSS.

Marc Andreessen’s 1993 comment ‘how is a text widget supposed to know where a sentence ends and where it doesn't? That sort of syntactic analysis we can't do...’: yes, it’s hard. English parsing is hard. Other languages are hard. I don’t believe that’s a reason not to do it any more.

My website has sentence spacing [1] in CSS as a purely aesthetic choice based on a technique by Tom Fine [2, 3]. And it’s automated: I run the site text, single-spaced, through a Python script that understands sentences and marks up sentence spacing.

[1] https://daveon.design/about-dave-on-design.html#typography-&...

[2] https://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/Tech/html-sentences.html

[3] http://widespacer.blogspot.com/

coxmichael• 3 years ago

Nice site/typography!

The bold and italics look like they’re being applied in browser though, rather than specific faces.

And it’s calling out for some small caps for acronyms like ‘HTML’.

Nice to see sites with this style, it’s very rare nowadays!

velcrovan2• 3 years ago

“Some” O’Reilly books aside, any professionally designed book published for the last hundred years on the shelves of anyone reading this, as well as every magazine and newspaper, uses single-spaced sentences.

That HTML collapses multiple spaces is a feature, not a bug. It means you can, if you want, double-space sentences while authoring/editing your source files and the result will still come out “correct” (according to settled practice).

qingcharles• 3 years ago

It's funny that such a flippant exchange is actually hugely significant for the English language. As most Roman text across the World is now consumed via HTML this brief discussion put the final nail in the coffin for the double-space-after-sentence jig.

The fact that the exchange is recorded is magnificent to me. We don't have a written dialogue of the guys who decided to start putting spaces in English words in the first place...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

perilunar2• 3 years ago

Spaces are significant, but now we have unicode, we can stop thinking about the number of spaces and start using the correct unicode character for the type of space we want. Unicode has at least 16 different types of space character.

As an experiment, here is some text with differing spaces. I wonder if HN can handle it:

En space between sentences: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent eu ullamcorper mi, id dictum nibh. Pellentesque fermentum efficitur viverra. Ut tincidunt ut nunc non viverra. Nunc accumsan ultrices libero ut efficitur. Vestibulum a eros a urna vestibulum tempor. Ut vel sodales tellus. Aliquam enim velit, varius eget mi ut, blandit dictum nulla. Quisque non malesuada felis. Duis sit amet sapien at risus efficitur fermentum. Aenean posuere tempus elit, nec eleifend tellus bibendum a. Suspendisse potenti.

Em space between sentences: Pellentesque semper sed enim a rutrum. Suspendisse iaculis laoreet leo, a tristique lorem tincidunt id. Ut lacinia, sem a sodales fermentum, leo diam elementum elit, vitae egestas risus velit non magna. Curabitur nec ligula quis sem imperdiet rhoncus sit amet a lorem. Donec ut risus sapien. Aenean et nisl quam. Aenean nec interdum metus, quis vulputate enim. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Nunc pulvinar molestie imperdiet. Etiam non nisi id leo blandit placerat vel ac ligula. Duis in urna quis erat dignissim pellentesque hendrerit sed sapien. Pellentesque tempor magna eu lacus laoreet tempor. Fusce nec tortor sed urna placerat bibendum eu id mi.

[edit: no, it can't. They work in plain HTML, so I guess the HN form is converting them to plain spaces.]

[edit, the second: try html entities [removed] — doesn't work either.]

kortex2• 3 years ago

start using the correct unicode character for the type of space we want.

but why

nutate• 3 years ago

from NASA: Space exploration helps to address fundamental questions about our place in the Universe and the history of our solar system.

bluepod4• 3 years ago

Explains the lack of emojis

sews thread

cwbrandsma• 3 years ago

16 types of space characters...but I don't want to think that hard.

jerf• 3 years ago

The good news is, you don't have to think that hard. A number of them are language specific, or very specific to a particular context.

The bad news is, with European languages having the longest tradition of printed word, they also still have quite a few varieties.

And in a 2023 where even today I can get oohs and aahs from multi-decade white-collar professionals when I show them that you can automatically generate a table of contents for a document if you just use the "Header 1" and "Header 2" formatting stuff correctly, I can't imagine a world where people are routinely entering multiple types of spaces typographically correctly.

(Which type of space is the best to use when holding the space bar down to center something, anyhow?)

nomel3• 3 years ago

I recommend that the space bar be broken up into at least three space buttons, to make this stance practical.

jacobsenscott2• 3 years ago

I was going to say you need 5 space buttons to chord all possible spaces, but I guess you can use 3 space buttons in combination with ctrl, (alt|option), and (win|command).

perilunar2• 3 years ago

We could use [space], option+[space], and option+shift+[space] to give a regular space, an en space, and an em space respectively. This would be similar to hyphen-minus/en-dash/em-dash, so easy to remember. And it could be done in software.

yellowapple4• 3 years ago

Why three? Only two kinds of space are necessary for the vast majority of English-language text: one to delimit words, and one to delimit sentences.

throwaway73454• 3 years ago

You are probably joking, but there are typewriters with split space bars exactly for this reason.

Terretta• 3 years ago

This made me curious whether HN collapses dashes as well. These all render the same in the text entry box:

- hyphen

– n dash [option -] or [Alt + 0150]

— m dash [option-shift -] or [Alt + 0151]

Also, these render as 3 spaces or single space wide in the text entry box:

... three periods

… ellipsis [opt ;] or [Alt + 0133]

EDIT: So the - – — work, and can visually suggest what should be happening in one's typography if you do not double space after sentence ending punctuation.

throw0101a• 3 years ago

… ellipsis

One slight annoyance I have on my Mac(s) is that if you have an ellipsis following by a period, you can tell the difference between the two. I would think it's more proper (?) that all the dots transparently flow together: ….

naikrovek3• 3 years ago

but now we have unicode, we can stop thinking about the number of spaces and start using the correct unicode character for the type of space we want.

my keyboards only have one spacebar, man. that means things I type get one type of space, though there can be multiple spacebar presses in a row.

santix• 3 years ago

https://docs.w3cub.com/latex/_005cfrenchspacing.html

mantella• 3 years ago

Until today, I never put it together that Guido van Rossum (python) and Just van Rossum (LettError) were related, though it makes total sense in retrospect. mind blown

butlersean• 3 years ago

despite what many pedants will have you believe, unlike many other languages there is no central authority of how english should be spoken or written. there isnt even a correct spelling of words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators

Axien• 3 years ago

Gen-X here. I was always a big fan of two spaces - because that is the way I was taught.

One day, a millennial woman in the office commented an email was from an old person. I asked how she knew. She said two spaces after a period.

That point forward I was a one space person.

patrickmay2• 3 years ago

You'll have to pry that second space from my cold, dead muscle memory.

jacobsenscott2• 3 years ago

It's already been done. Almost all email content read through web browsers these days, which do exactly that.

naikrovek3• 3 years ago

same. I don't care if it labels me as old. I am old.

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

That point forward I was a one space person.

You shouldn't fold so easily. She gave you a compliment, anyway.

mturmon• 3 years ago

pls also refrain from initial caps and message-terminating periods

mprovost• 3 years ago

Apparently (according to TikTok) ending a sentence with an ellipsis is also a Gen-X thing...

nick-of-time2• 3 years ago

GenX and older. I get the impression that you read ellipses with a very different tone than I do. Ellipses indicate trailing off your sentence, especially with suggestive connotations [1]. As you can imagine, this is uncomfortable to read just as it is to listen to.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-kidding-unless

someweirdperson2• 3 years ago

Do whatever you want, but DO NOT put space before punctuation marks. With the exception of space before smileys that are substituting punctuation.

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

And don't use smileys as substitutes for punctuation.

aunetx• 3 years ago

It's funny because in French, you are meant to put a space between punctuation marks if and only if they contain two elements.

So you put a space before :, ;, «, !, ? etc but not before ., ,, ..., etc

And I find it wonderful!

ianburrell• 3 years ago

One thing that doesn't get brought up is that there is a difference between typewriter and word processor. One space works best in proportional fonts with typeset work. Two spaces work best in monospace fonts like text editor. The reason is that in typeset, the space after periods is wider than space between words, while in monospace need to put extra space to distinguish sentences. I think that some of the conflict comes from when and where people learned the rule.

Before computers, people used typewriters and were taught to use two spaces after period. Typesetters knew to use the right space. Early computers were mostly monospace. Word processors introduced variable fonts and were smart enough to collapse two spaces. Email and text editors were monospace. The web made everything proportional and collapsed two spaces to one hiding any difference in source. One space has won enough that people use one space in monospace text.

joegahona2• 3 years ago

This is covered in the "The PC Is Not a Typewriter"[1], by Robin Williams. (No, not that Robin Williams.) I adjusted from two spaces to one back in 1999 or so, when I read this book, and the adjustment wasn't as painful as I thought it'd be. I learned on a typewriter in the late '80s.

For some reason, Stephen King uses two spaces between each word in his Tweets.[2] Not sure if this is some statement he's making or a technical glitch.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/PC-Not-Typewriter-Creating-Profession...

[2] https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1678579628686946304?s...

distcs8• 3 years ago

I adjusted from two spaces to one back in 1999 or so, when I read this book, and the adjustment wasn't as painful as I thought it'd be.

Did you switch from two spaces to one space while writing in a text editor using monospace font too?

gdwatson• 3 years ago

Historically English-language typography, in contrast to French typography, used a larger space between sentences than between words. Typists imitated this traditional style. The single-space style gained typograhic ground through the twentieth century, becoming the norm in the 1950s.

Preferring a single space between sentences is a reasonable choice. But flagging or "correcting" the two-space style is simply a mistake.

opello• 3 years ago

One thing that doesn't get brought up...

Except it was brought up in the 3rd message[0] of the linked thread.

Typists follow the rule of adding an extra space between sentences within a paragraph. The rule for books (and by extension, anything that does not use a fixed-pitch, monospaced font) is to use the same space between sentences as between words.

[0] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0024.ht...

DanielKehoe2• 3 years ago

Yes, I wrote that message 30 years ago. I actually had copies of both "Words into Type" and the "Chicago Manual of Style" on my desk when I wrote that message because I had worked in the publishing industry as a copy editor before getting involved in the tech industry. Some publishing houses had their own style guides or were inconsistent from book to book (like O'Reilly), but WIT and Chicago were the accepted authorities. Whether the conventions of the book industry should have guided technologies like web browsers is a matter for debate, but at the time I wanted to make the point that two spaces after a period were typists' habit and not a publishing convention. I'm amazed that this point is still debated so passionately when most people have never touched a typewriter.

davidmurphy• 3 years ago

https://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-2nd/dp/0201782634

staplung• 3 years ago

I used to be firmly in the one-space camp because my first intro to the subject was from Robin Williams _The Mac Is Not A Typewriter_. However, at some point -probably one of the regular resurrections of this debate on HN - I came across a convincing argument that the line of reasoning in that book is wrong; that it was actually common for typeset books to use larger spaces between sentences than between words and that when the typewriter was invented, the two space rule came about because that's what people were already used to seeing.

I got so sick of all the arguments from ignorance that I decided to get empirical and have taken to examining the type in old books to see if there's any kind of consistency as you work back in time from the word-processor era to the typewriter era to the pre-typewriter-era. The problem is that I don't have access to enough old books to come to much of a conclusion.

I have _The Works of Shakespeare_ from 1919 (MacMillan and Co.) and it definitely uses wider spaces between sentences than between words. This is true both in the fully justified text of the preface as well as in the ragged right of the plays.

I also have a Webster's Dictionary from 1937 and it too uses wider spaces between sentences than between words. All the text is fully justified.

However, virtually all modern books use the same width space between words as between sentences. Notice that I'm _not_ saying "one space" or "two spaces" because books are typically fully-justified and so it can easily be the case that all the spaces on a line are much wider than a single space character; it's just that the space between sentences is no wider than the space between words.

Which brings me to what I feel like is usually ignored in these debates: justification. Professionally typeset works that get printed are almost universally fully justified. Everything else - typical word-processor output, the entirety of the web, etc. is left justified. if you're going to write an algorithm for full-justification you're going to have to mess with spacing and it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to put a little more space between sentences than between words. Although presumably it's algorithmically simpler to treat all spaces the same way, especially if there aren't great rules for even knowing when a sentence ends e.g. "No, I expect you to die Mr. Bond".

distcs8• 3 years ago

I used to be firmly in the one-space camp because my first intro to the subject was from Robin Williams _The Mac Is Not A Typewriter_.

So which camp are you in now? I did a 'view source' on your comment. I see you still type with a single space after period. So are you still in the one-space camp? Can you share a little bit more about which camp you are in and why?

yellowapple4• 3 years ago

But seriously, how is a text widget supposed to know where a sentence ends and where it doesn't?

By scanning for terminating punctuation followed by either two spaces or a newline. What's that? You don't use double-spaces between each sentence? Sucks to be you! The Man™ can pry my double-spaces from my cold dead fingers.

And I say terminating punctuation in general (not just periods) because there's a growing number of cases of other such punctuation occurring within certain proper nouns - for example, "Panic! at the Disco".

jhoechtl• 3 years ago

Currently discussed in https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/14wn2ld/i_am_going_w...

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

YOVKIDSTHESEDAYSHAVEITSOEASY|ISAYBRINGBACKSCRIPTIOCONTINVAANDMAGISCULETEXT|LETTHEBODIESFALLVVWERETHEYMAY.

(Two-spacer 4evvah)

crabbone• 3 years ago

I will write two spaces as long as Emacs has by-sentence navigation. I wouldn't care what anyone thinks about it.

I studied printing and typography in particular, as a student. I worked in printing and publishing, mostly in a large newspaper before I pivoted to programming. I haven't done any work in that area since the time Adobe Pagemaker overtook QuarkXPress (around the time of G5 and MacOS X). But, I think the principles are still valid to this day as nothing really changed in the printed text.

So, when paginating a newspaper, the goal is to achieve a "pleasant look". This includes a bunch of rules that... sort of have some justification sometimes, and less so other times... well, here are some examples:

* Don't allow for four consecutive lines to end with hyphens because it breaks the visual image of the body of text as a rectangle (or whatever other shape that the text was intended to flow in). Obviously, four here is a heuristic, and in reality will depend on the space between lines, the size of the font etc. But, the rule says "four".

* Similarly, don't allow for four consecutive lines to have spaces between words align vertically because it creates an artifact in the otherwise uniform rectangle filled by text.

* Don't allow for a single line from the previous paragraph to start a page / a column because readers want a paragraph to be close together as it's supposed to convey a single thought.

And there are many, many more, including the size of dashes that should be used in specifying year or time spans, used in math formulas as minus, used in direct speech, used as way to separate sub-sentences and so on. Unfortunately, these also vary by language and country. Sometimes even the prose vs verse will affect the preferred length of dashes.

So, when it comes to periods, they can happen in acronyms, in initials or to signal the end of the sentence. When they are used in acronyms or, and especially in initials / titles, it's very desirable to keep the word following the period with the space on the same line with whatever preceded the period. I.e. "V. I. Lenin" should be treated as a single word, from typographical perspective. In practice, in typography, there are "unbreakable" symbols, mostly dashes and spaces, and these would be used for titles and initials to prevent accidental linebreak from cutting through someone's name. In contrast to this, it's highly desirable that the linebreak occurs where the sentence ends.

Since keyboards offer limited input capabilities when it comes to text formatting, and in order to help editors to present text in a more easily digestible way, it seems like putting two spaces after a period, if it's meant to terminate a sentence is a small price to pay.

My typical way of working with prose in Emacs is that I repeatedly ask it to re-flow the paragraph (because of the edits I make to it). So, on top of being able to skip number of whole sentences in any direction, I would also prefer that the editor doesn't break initials off the name, while try to break lines on sentence end.

Most computer users today use crippled text editors s.a. VSCode or MS Word, which don't offer similar functionality, and so to their users double space after period would appear as a meaningless chore. I understand that the needs of the majority is where it will end in the end of the day, but, personally, will never accept this kind of approach.

__MatrixMan__• 3 years ago

Since the majority of the text I produce these days is rendered as markdown before being shown to a reader, I've taken to putting newlines after periods. It makes prose much easier to edit with a linewise-thinking code editor, and the reader doesn't notice.

After developing this habit, I now personally find it also easier to skim text with the newlines shown because I know that the beginning of the line is also the beginning of the sentence.

nick-of-time2• 3 years ago

Same for me, I write either markdown or latex and both have this behavior. In latex it's outright recommended, for ease of commenting out or moving sentences.

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

I learned something interesting about myself here...

I was always in the "two spaces after the period" camp, because that's how I was taught as a young sprout. So I assumed that's how I still write.

I've been writing and publishing fiction and nonfiction for decades and took a quick tour through my work. My early work does indeed have two spaces after each period.

But, at some point, I started to shift. I went through a couple of years where I was inconsistent about using two spaces or one, and after that, all of my writing uses one space exclusively.

I didn't even notice that change in my own writing. It boggled my brain a little bit.

watersb• 3 years ago

Am I the only one who thought this was about low-orbit adventure following menstruation?

Because seriously I did. Thankfully, by the 1990s NASA had a bit more experience with female astronauts. A popular story of NASA’s initial accommodation is entertaining and seemed like legit fodder for HN thread:

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/03/1102635355/marcia-belsky-that...

https://www.poynter.org/tfcn/2021/did-nasa-send-a-woman-to-s...

glonq• 3 years ago

Two semesters of touch-typing in the 1980's has cemented two-spaces into my muscle memory. I can't shake it; it looks/feels wrong to use one space even though I respect the efficiency and aesthetics of that.

robomartin• 3 years ago

This is is interesting. When I learned to type, I also learned to use two spaces after a sentence. The habit stuck. I don’t think about it at all, it just happens. And, yes, paragraphs sometimes look weird to me if sentences are not separated by two spaces.

Space After Periods (1993)

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