Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong – lies typographers tell about history

http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324

by eru • 13 years ago

309 222 13 years ago

CharlesW• 13 years ago

Not sure if serious?

pmichaud• 13 years ago

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

anon13852• 13 years ago

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

danellis• 13 years ago

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

jbri• 13 years ago

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;).

eru2• 13 years ago

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

peterkelly7• 13 years ago

The page actually has a stylesheet which sets white-space: pre-wrap, which tells the browser to preserve the double-spaces. It's like <pre> but with line wrapping enabled.

MaxGabriel• 13 years ago

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...

tlarkworthy• 13 years ago

I judge that it makes little difference.

colanderman• 13 years ago

The author's proposed solution to custom-typeset to avoid this is not sustainable (because it's sensitive to reformatting) or practical.

Isn't this what computers are for?

doorhammer• 13 years ago

For anyone who hasn't seen it. An interesting read:

river detection in text http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/374/river-detection-i...

former HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5268364

dalke• 13 years ago

"not sustainable ... or practical"

The thesis is that the publishers pushed for the rule because it was cheaper. Your view is aligned with that thesis.

The author doesn't propose a two-space solution. The author explicitly says that you should feel free to use either one space or two spaces. Instead, the author points out that the older solution was based on having knowledgeable typesetters.

DanBC• 13 years ago

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

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

alayne3• 13 years ago

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."

peterkelly7• 13 years ago

Your browser most likely took this into account when doing the text layout. HTML & CSS don't specify algorithms for line-breaking, which the person who wrote that may not have realised.

In order to demonstrate the problem reliably, they would have had to use an image or PDF file. But the fact that your browser fixed it (as did mine) indicates that it's not actually a problem, since it can be solved automatically in software.

ksherlock• 13 years ago

I can only assume the text is supposed to be full justified. It's fairly hideous looking otherwise and it explains the bizarre hyphenation.

If you tweak the css (text-align: justify), 1-4 word sentences do stand out in a bad way.

Personally, I find the double-spaced version more readable.

habitue• 13 years ago

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)

burgerz• 13 years ago

that figures out all the spacing for you

What are you even talking about? Yes Word figures out spacing for you too.

realo• 13 years ago

Typography is complex and Word is quite inadequate for that.

For example, take the simple subject of rivers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)

LaTex knows about those and will try to avoid them.

Latex provides end results which are acceptable, typography-wise. Word is merely a word processor and cannot be trusted to produce the actual end result.

latk3• 13 years ago

What are you talking about? Word does not manage spacing (and other layout) on the level LaTeX does. Word processors usually allow you to type multiple adjacent spaces, which does not make any typographic sense. Instead, LaTeX uses spaces of different variable widths and heights. In some configurations, it will follow the double-width space after a sentence-convention.

smalltalk• 13 years ago

So does InDesign, which uses the TeX algorithm, QuarkXPress, and just about any other application that lays out text. Even Word! Think of that! A program far more suited to laying out a visual medium (i.e., a visual program) could be as good or better than a 35 year old programming language that has a default typeface that's pretty much the most hideous ever designed by humankind (Knuth couldn't have done a worse job on Computer Modern).

alayne3• 13 years ago

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

latk3• 13 years ago

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.

tomjen3• 13 years ago

LaTeX is a real tool, so naturally it takes quite some work for a beginner to be able to use it - the advantage is its raw power.

And yes you can definitely use it to do custom things, and yes it can be made to not move graphics around, which is usually the biggest complaint MS Word users has, but no you shouldn't do it.

adiM• 13 years ago

William Adams (http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio.h...) is a typographer who has extensively used both InDesign/Quark and TeX. He has often posted his experience with the two in different tex related mailing lists: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Comparison_between_ConTeXt_and...

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

I don't use LaTeX often at all, but I have found in the past that it was awesome for collaborative papers. Just check it in to version control, start taking advantage of include to break it up into logical parts and reduce the frequency of merges, and you're golden.

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

I think LaTeX is overprescribed.

I think it's underprescribed.

I've only just started using it (I've been aware of it and taken peaks from time to time). For both my own authoring and for marking up content from elsewhere (HTML or text dumps) it's quick, easy, and convenient. Some works take a while (lots of formatting and footnotes), others largely require only slapping on a prefix, an "\end{document}" at the end, and chapter headings.

Among the best aspects: once you've got marked-up Tex format, you can publish to pretty much any format you wish. The source can be managed under source control, you're free to use any editor you wish. Autoload / autobuild features make tracking minor tweaks easy (as others have noted, the evince PDF viewer will reload a file on change).

Styles can be modified. That's the brilliance of LaTeX. Write your text. Worry about the presentation side later. And the default styles _are_ good. Better by far than much of what goes on the Web these days.

And if you absolutely must, it's still possible to go to a specific layout tool to get pixel-perfect output.

jessriedel• 13 years ago

In addition, LaTeX is clear that the preferred separation after a sentence is 1.5 spaces. The End.

Raphael• 13 years ago

What a compromise.

lelf2• 13 years ago

No, it's not. It is

  normal space + extra space ± stretch’/shrink’

where spaces depend on font, stretch’ and shrink’ depend on normal stretch/shrink and space factor.

Not to mention \frenchspacing (TLDR: it's also language-dependend)

pseut2• 13 years ago

I always use \frenchspacing and make it 1.

jere2• 13 years ago

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...

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

That is arguably a bug in wordpress.

I've, like you, noticed that wordpress seems to change (some? all?) spaces to non-collapsing spaces (not sure exactly what mechanism is used);

this article and your comment makes me curious as to why. Is it an explicit attempt to support two spaces after periods?

If so, there's a way for wordpress to fix the the bug; leave most spaces alone, but convert two spaces after a period or other sentence ending puctuation (and only there) to a &ensp; or &emps;. But it's hard to say for sure this would be an improvement if we don't know what the heck wordpress is trying to do in the first place with it's odd behavior; i've never seen it documented.

I also hadn't known that linotype did/does collapse whitespace (including newlines) too -- the heritage of HTML's similar behavior?

anon13852• 13 years ago

That isn't the fault of double spacing[1], it's the fault of HTML for being a shit system for typography and Wordpress for trying to fix that in a broken way (using a space followed by nbsp rather than an en-space (or whatever value of wider space you prefer)).

[1] I think double is the wrong term here since most people don't actually want two full spaces, but creating anything else is too hard most of the time (or impossible on a typewriter).

bhauer• 13 years ago

That appears to be his platform replacing the space+space he typed with space+nbsp.

As a fan of double spacing after sentences, in my own systems I replace space+space with nbsp+space. Attaching the non-breaking space to the previous word (opposed to the next) avoids that odd indentation behavior you've cited. Instead, it means in edge cases, the last word of a sentence might be wrapped to the next line when its width alone doesn't merit the wrap, but most readers' eyes cannot perceive that.

I've found it disappointing that HTML/CSS has no ability to specify preservation of two inter-sentence spaces while retaining conventional word-wrap semantics. I suppose in some ideal world, it would not be simply "preserve" what is typed, but "detect sentences and apply my preferred spacing," allowing adjustment by the reader in a user style-sheet.

binarymax• 13 years ago

I've found it disappointing that HTML/CSS has no ability to specify preservation of two inter-sentence spaces while retaining conventional word-wrap semantics.

You can accomplish this with CSS3 white-space:pre-wrap

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/haIFz

Periodic• 13 years ago

You can use other HTML entities, such as &ensp; &emsp; which should have a wider width while wrapping as if it were a single space.

modarts• 13 years ago

That's a little neurotic to be honest.

adwf• 13 years ago

Yeah I tend to liken the debate over sentence spacing to the "debate" over whether a toilet seat should be left up or down.

It's generally petty and irrelevant (most people don't even notice). And it's 100% an annoying discussion I'd rather not be spending even a minute of my time on.

btilly2• 13 years ago

If you're going to hate over that, then I'm glad not to know you. I was taught to double space in typing class many years ago. I do it by habit now. I prefer the way it looks. In fact if you look at the source to any comment I make, you'll find that I do it by habit DESPITE the fact that I know that in many mediums it is going to get lost.

I've noticed many writers that I respect doing the same thing. I'd include patio11 as an example.

The fact that WordPress does the wrong thing with it is a bug in WordPress. The fact that you would hate the way that many good writers like to type, and like to see their words written, is a bug in your brain.

jere2• 13 years ago

We both have preferences. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit on mine (it's never put me off from reading anybody, including Patrick), but this... really?

If you're going to hate over that, then I'm glad not to know you...The fact that you would hate the way that many good writers like to type, and like to see their words written, is a bug in your brain.

Damn.

Gigablah• 13 years ago

In fact if you look at the source to any comment I make, you'll find that I do it by habit DESPITE the fact that I know that in many mediums it is going to get lost.

I believe you also have a bug in your brain.

Chris_Newton• 13 years ago

[Edit: Sorry, I replied to the wrong post. It was btilly who wrote the following quote, in another reply to the parent post.]

I prefer the way it looks.

And in the end, this is why so many petty typographic debates are futile.

Some aspects of typography are about practical matters. The choices here tend to be quite objective, and almost everyone will agree about which choices are better, at least once they appreciate the significance of the difference. Using a programming font where some characters look too similar leads to bugs. Setting a magazine article with a huge line length and tiny font size will likely reduce reading speed and retention.

Other aspects of typography are about subjective taste, a matter of art and personal design choices. This is almost always the case with trivial whitespace and punctuation issues. Does anyone really fail to understand the meaning of a post here on HN because the poster used a double-hyphen (--) as informal punctuation instead of looking up the code for a typographer’s em-dash (—)? Will anyone die if I personally set my em-dashes with a space either side in HTML because I think the “standard” tight setting looks awkward? Of course not.

Sometimes a change falls between these two clear categories, and this is the case with doubling spaces after punctuation. To some extent, the basic appearance is subjective, but if the design choices result in rivers appearing in the text, this will almost certainly impair readability, an objectively worse situation. However, in these cases there is rarely a better answer than having someone who knows what they’re doing examine the specific piece of typesetting and make manual adjustments to fix the problems. It’s an exercise that I think anyone seriously interested in typography should try at least once, both to understand how easily any automated system can get things wrong in specific cases and to understand how impractically time-consuming and expensive it would be to have human operators review everything and fix all such minor details manually.

enraged_camel3• 13 years ago

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

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...

mcphilip• 13 years ago

Calling ignorant what is indisputably taught in many places as standard syntax is pathetically pedantic. Honestly this is the first discussion of single vs double spacing rules that I've encountered. It's been taught to me since grade school and will take more than a vitriolic Slate article to break that habit.

Dru89• 13 years ago

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

eagsalazar22• 13 years ago

lol, dude that was funny.

einhverfr2• 13 years ago

What you really need is something like LateX which adjusts the space following a full stop dynamically. This causes problems like detecting a full stop sometimes (consider something like St. Olaf which will look funny unless you tell LaTeX not to do this!)

The fact is that the extra spacing makes stuff easier to read. It isn't usually 1 space vs 2. I think LaTeX uses more nuanced rules than that.

mistercow• 13 years ago

Here's another reason it's bad: it increases the problem of rivers in the text, degrading readability.

joosters2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

onli2• 13 years ago

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.

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

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_8• 13 years ago

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

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

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.

Dylan168074• 13 years ago

It's D9D9D9, that's 85% bright. It has plenty of contrast here.

peterkelly7• 13 years ago

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_8• 13 years ago

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.

nkuttler• 13 years ago

Sigh. Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.her...

Poor Wordpress.

girzel• 13 years ago

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.

stuartjmoore• 13 years ago

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

Dylan168074• 13 years ago

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

pcl• 13 years ago

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.

mgsouth• 13 years ago

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...

nn3• 13 years ago

`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?

robot_8• 13 years ago

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.

DannyBee2• 13 years ago

The article reads like a reasonable response to what is essentially a bullshit rewriting of history.

Now, there are certainly arguments in favor of one space, but "history" is not one of them :)

robot_8• 13 years ago

The argument by typographers has no grounding in history, it's a choice based on preferred visual rhythm.

asveikau4• 13 years ago

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.

robot_8• 13 years ago

I honestly don't know what I expected from programmers discussing typography... so much misinformation in this thread

robot_8• 13 years ago

Just because you say "I don't think I'm being stubborn" does not make it so. You clearly are. No one claimed bathing or brushing are bad habits that should be changed.

meangeme2• 13 years ago

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

glaugh• 13 years ago

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...

rz2k2• 13 years ago

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.

chilldream• 13 years ago

He's not using the existence of double-spacing as a historical standard to argue that double-spacing is correct. He's using the existence of double-spacing as a historical standard to argue that single-spacing isn't the historical standard.

theschizoidman• 13 years ago

Readers Digest from the 1950s ... conversational tone

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

rz2k2• 13 years ago

I think they used to be on books.google.com, but here are some issues of Popular Mechanics that can be browsed:

http://books.google.com/books?id=xNwDAAAAMBAJ

Spooky232• 13 years ago

Check out:

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.

VBprogrammer• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

kefka• 13 years ago

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.

einhverfr2• 13 years ago

ACTUALLYITWASDURINGTHEREIGNOFCHARLEMAGNETHATSPACINGCAPITALIZATIONANDPUNCTUATIONWEREADDED ASCONVENTIONSTOMANUSCRIPTWRITINGTHANKALCUINTHATSUCHTHINGSCHANGED

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

NOWTOBETRVLYACCVRATEYOVWOVLDHAVETOREPLACEALLINSTANCESOF'V'WITH'V'ASTHEROMANSDIDNTHAVETHELETTER'V'

harshreality3• 13 years ago

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).

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

Honestly, I think it's neurotic that human beings will receive criticism for, and have to worry about the choice of how many times they tap a space bar when writing (not even coding). That we have to even include things like output format and source format to distinguish between is just on another level entirely (I'm not criticizing you, your point is valid).

I mean, when I read titles like this I think to myself, "Who gives a shit?"...then I read a long thread and think, "Wow, this is actually a real debate."

I never knew there was so much that could go into a decision about typesetting spaces. You learn something new everyday.

harshreality3• 13 years ago

Find a reason to write a program that needs to separate prose into sentences, then ask yourself if the argument is neurotic.

It's common to use tables of abbreviations to know when a period is probably not the end of a sentence, and then apply imperfect rules to handle edge cases like proper nouns. It's tedious and inaccurate.

rmrfrmrf2• 13 years ago

I mean, when I read titles like this I think to myself, "Who gives a shit?"...then I read a long thread and think, "Wow, this is actually a real debate."

May I interest you in some further reading? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation

krisgee2• 13 years ago

  bracket_fun(){
      stuff;
  }

  bracket_fun()
  {
      stuff;
  }

peterkelly7• 13 years ago

Definitely in agreement on this one. I have a writing app which uses HTML as it's native format, and I've received a number of complaints from people about how it doesn't allow you to use multiple consecutive spaces. I suspect most of them are coming from a MS Word background (the app lets you edit Word documents but converts them temporarily to HTML for editing).

Usually I just explain that this is how HTML works; whitespace is collapsed, and so my app is inherently dependent upon the capabilities of HTML and the layout engine being used (in my case, WebKit).

However after the most recent complaint I finally spent some time looking deeper into the CSS spec and found out that you can set white-space: pre-wrap on a style, which will preserve consecutive spaces in the way that some people are accustomed to in Word. Now that I'm aware of this, I'll be turning this on by default for Word documents when I translate them to HTML, and for documents stored directly in HTML format I'll offer this as an option that can be set on a document-wide or style-specific basis.

I've always seen the one-space vs. two-space argument as a bit pointless, since this is something that is within the domain of what software can handle, for the most part. LaTeX has facilities for adding extra space after periods, for example. The main difficulty is distinguishing between abbreviations and words like e.g. which don't start a new sentence, so you don't want extra space after them. And I'm not aware if any web browser or HTML layout engines which add extra space like LaTeX (which I think is 1.5 times a normal space), but I cold be wrong.

As much as I've been in the camp of "just use one space; what's the big deal?" I think you've raised a very good point that the double-space can be treated as semantic information that instructs the typesetting system to place the surrounding characters further apart, even if it isn't exactly two spaces (and in the case of justified text, giving a greater weight to whitespace specified using two space characters).

TL;DR: white-space: pre-wrap is a handy feature of CSS

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

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.

Patrick_Devine• 13 years ago

The part which you omitted is that you can also use a period for denoting an abbreviation. It then can become ambiguous as to whether you're parsing that, or the end of a line. The only way to then determine whether it's an abbreviation is to use some other form of heuristic, which becomes a pain in the ass.

Regardless, we're seriously into Parkinson's Law of Triviality territory. I'll support either way as long as the bike shed has an aluminum roof.

asdfs• 13 years ago

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).

jdhzzz• 13 years ago

WTF?? So,, yes,, use double-commas to drive home your point since you must have had some reason to put them there. I will continue to use double space after the end of a sentence for the same reason.

kbenson7• 13 years ago

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?

Do double commas serve some purpose other than a presentational quirk? Double spaces at the end of a sentence have semantic meaning distinct from a single space, as shown by other replies.

I think for your argument to make sense you either need to show that double spaces don't have any special distinguishing characteristic at the end of a sentence, or allow that they do, and double commas to as well, but we're better off without them. Otherwise, I don't really see a relation between double commas and double spaces at the end of a sentence.

raldi• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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?

huma• 13 years ago

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

nutate• 13 years ago

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.

vuldin• 13 years ago

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

ddebernardy• 13 years ago

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.

rayiner• 13 years ago

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.

overgard• 13 years ago

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.

Spooky232• 13 years ago

I actually do this, and it's a great lunatic detector.

My grandparents taught me to use "Oxford commas" and double spaces after sentences when I was very young. To me, it looks better on paper that way. I never thought about it until I had a psychotic teacher who actually deducted points for my writing "1, 2, and 3" instead of "1, 2 and 3".

It inspired me to make it a point to include these more archaic practices in my more formal writing. And doing so always flushes out a few grammar lunatics.

emddudley• 13 years ago

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

ledge2• 13 years ago

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.

dpkendal• 13 years ago

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.

rafcavallaro2• 13 years ago

yesandletsgetridofthosepeskypacesbetweenwordstoo!

keithpeter• 13 years ago

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...

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• 13 years ago

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.

lutusp3• 13 years ago

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

derefr• 13 years ago

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

minor_nitwit• 13 years ago

Doesn't work for abbreviations.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

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.

rmrfrmrf2• 13 years ago

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    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!

rafcavallaro2• 13 years ago

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.

arnorhs• 13 years ago

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.

Glyptodon• 13 years ago

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.

eagsalazar22• 13 years ago

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).

Tloewald• 13 years ago

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.

dgesang• 13 years ago

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.

pradocchia3• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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?

pradocchia3• 13 years ago

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.

catenate• 13 years ago

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

dnautics2• 13 years ago

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...

FkZ• 13 years ago

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.

EGreg• 13 years ago

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 :)

stretchwithme• 13 years ago

  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.

lutusp3• 13 years ago

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.

meangeme2• 13 years ago

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."

bowerbird• 13 years ago

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

gregors2• 13 years ago

Two spaces is wrong.

Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong – lies typographers tell about history

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