6 ms·

Never Put Two Spaces After a Period

15 points by ALee 10y ago

danjoc 10y ago
"Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s."
ddingus 10y ago
...or not. I do it, likely will continue, and still do use monospace fonts. What will happen is people will largely center on one or another, have their reasons, with a majority doing single space. As for caps lock, clearly the author has not dirtied their refined hands on many numerical control systems. Oh, the shame and horror! Sans the ongoing lectures about what "we want" as writers, one space would probably be adopted far more rapidly. Sometimes we want flow, sometimes we want a pause, and we may want a lot of things not necessarily in line with style purists best efforts. TL;DR (complete with pretentious semicolon) I'm so sorry this trivia is elevated to such a point of concern. I feel you. Really. Ahem. (Pause intended, made explicit as HN renders with one space -a fine solution.)
flukus 10y ago
TIL a lot of people use two spaces and are very passionate about it. I've never heard of this in my life.
- amingilani 10y ago
  And how does their autocorrect not flag this?
- Ntrails 10y ago
  I was told to do it as a child, I've never thought about it since. When I wrote letters, incidentally, I would also probably leave more space between full stops and new sentences than I would between words? Since his main argument is "nobody uses monospaced fonts" but my first action upon starting a new job is to change all the text defaults to be consolas I feel fine about my behaviour.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Is it an american thing? Or maybe an age thing? As I was going through school a lot of this stuff (any right alignment, commas after dear sir, etc) were being dropped. The only one that sunk it was typing out full names for numbers, one and twenty-two instead of 1 and 22, but I only stick to that up to ten, not 1000 like I was taught.
    - Ntrails 10y ago
      Dunno, I'm English so it's not an American thing. I don't even ever remember being taught it specifically but obviously I was because I sure as hell didn't make it up myself :p
makecheck 10y ago
I think it is far easier to read with two spaces, even in proportional fonts; on web pages I even add a Unicode non-breaking space after the period so that the browser will not absorb it.
- DerekL 10y ago
  What you should do instead is use an en or em space. Some people put a regular space and then a non-breaking space after the period. But this is a really bad idea, because if the line is broken after the sentence, the non-breaking space is attached to the start of the next sentence, so it gets indented.
  - makecheck 10y ago
    Non-breaking is much more convenient. On the Mac I can use Option-space to insert a non-breaking space and continue, whereas another variant of space would require something more (like a key palette). And I attach the non-breaking space to the period, followed by a normal space so wrapping seems fine.
  - milesrout 10y ago
    No, what you should do is just put a space or two spaces. You should not try to reinvent typography. Two spaces means that if software wants to try to find sentences, it can easily do so, but will still render properly (as a single space) if not.
intopieces 10y ago
>When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong-that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space-the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know. Pretty rich talk from someone who used a hyphen in place of an em dash.
- anotheryou 10y ago
  Do you put spaces around em dashes—those of this kind? edit: Ah, in german we use a shorter one with spaces – like this. Still longer than a minus: -
  - intopieces 10y ago
    I usually do put spaces around them, but that is a style choice I consider less important than the length of the dash itself. The style the author uses is indistinguishable from a hyphenated noun, like "hurdy-gurdy."
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
Camillo 10y ago
The double-space just says "I was raised in the jungle by wild typists, and did not lay my eyes upon a printed book until the age of 25".
repsilat 10y ago
Well, now that browsers and everything else will ignore the second space we can focus on more important things, like which one computers prefer. And computers probably prefer two spaces so they can tell acronyms and abbreviations from the ends of sentences. I'll never get used to typing that second space, but it beats a single newline or bad kerning or whatever the alternative is.
ce4 10y ago
Obligatory xkcd on kerning :) https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/
Nelkins 10y ago
ha, Even with this article being from 2014, I find it funny to see that the author continued to pen jeremiads on the epidemic of two spaces in modern society for years[1]. Sort of an unusual (and in my mind, pretentious) cause to take up. In any case, it's not true. If you want to use two spaces after a period, continue to do so--I do. Here's a long rebuttal on why two spaces after a period doesn't really matter[2] and the corresponding HN discussion from four years ago[3]. [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/... [2] http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324 http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385448 Edit: I typed this comment with two spaces after each period. Try it yourself, you'll see the rendered HTML only has one space. This is a solved problem folks, just do it however you like! Edit2: Just realized that even though this Business Insider article is dated 2014, the article is the same one the author wrote in 2011.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  You can continue to do so. But your readers will hate you if you go to the extra effort of adding non-breaking spaces, because many people find two spaces in electronic text painfully distracting. The "rule" is literally a waste of space. It's like playing an annoying harpsichord accompaniment in the background to all your voice and video calls. The history is beside the point. The reality is the web has its own de facto standards enforced in HTML, as does modern typography, as does email. Obscure forgotten metal print layout traditions from the 18th and 19th centuries are a historical footnote now, and not relevant to any of the above.
Yohohoman 10y ago
I personally have no idea about typography, but I use double space after a period for semantics --- as a sentence terminator. because, you know, there are languages where periods are used not only for terminating sentences. as a side note --- capitalising the first letter of a sentence is a convention similar to putting two spaces between sentences. why does the author do this?
rleigh 10y ago
Emacs puts two spaces after a period when reflowing paragraphs. So I've been going with that default for years as the path of least resistance. Since it makes monospaced text slightly more readable and most rendered text output (TeX, Sphinx, Markdown etc.) ignore the additional space and omit it from their output, it doesn't have any significant detraction to me as an author, so I'll continue to live in the two space camp.
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  In Emacs there's an option to change that.
hiperlink 10y ago
Steve Losh has some arguments for putting two: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/why-i-two-space/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/why-i-two-space/
sunstone 10y ago
In the days of ink and paper the extra space had a measurable cost that accountants considered unconscionable. Those days are gone but the sentiment continues as a ghost of past technologies in the minds of those who can't move on.
unsignedint 10y ago
I have had numerous occasions discussing this topics b with my peers before and concluded this is really like a religion and will be very difficult to convince anyone to change to another. (I use one space myself.) It causes bit of side effects to have two spaces after period, like if one of them rolling into beginning of a new line and what they ought to do is to define those spaces as a non-breakable spaces, to indicate they shouldn't be separated, but I don't see this praciticed too often.
ionised 10y ago
Weird. Never heard of this two-space thing before, at least not growing up and working in the UK.
hilbert42 10y ago
""Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know. Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. " I really think this guy Farhad Manjoo is trying to buy an argument where one doesn't exist. Perhaps he's practicing for April Fools' Day which isn't far off! In his aforementioned quote, either he fails to justify his statements/claims or he covers a lot of mileage to prove minor points, same goes for the rest of his post. Sure, he has links to references and that fine (and the ones I looked at I didn't dispute,)—however that's not the most significant point. Just because someone or authority dictates or pontificates from upon high that something is this or that, or is supposed to be a certain way etc. doesn't give that person or anything he says higher authority or even any credibility whatsoever. Moreover, often so-called 'orthodoxy' can actually be wrong or misinterpreted. That said, professional standards are very important, so is the craft and experience of the artisan. However, 'double spacing after a stop between sentences' simply doesn't drop into this category, it's a lower-order exercise. It is not as if the typist who puts in a 'double-stop' is 'performing' at the level of a Graphic artists or typesetter does when he/she say typesets a novel in Palatino for general market release. If the typist does worry thus, then I'd humbly suggest that he/she is overly obsessed about the matter or has some kind of fetish about it. (No, I'm not being derogatory here as I actually understand the issue. Let me give you an example. When, say, I'm in a supermarket checkout aisle that has a checkout sign to the effect "People with less than 12 items" then I have a strong urge to cross out 'less' and replace it with the correct word 'fewer' but I never act upon it.) It boils down to this, I am a very fussy person but nowhere as fussy as Farhad Manjoo, he strikes me as bordering on the obsessive. The Issues as I perceive them: --------------------------------------- 1. I use 'double spacing after a stop between sentences' and a colon because it emphases the stop or colon itself. That's to say, it strengthens the action of the punctuation and makes the page more readable. Moreover, I have done so for years, and I have no intention of stopping. 1.1 Often seriffed fonts with various degrees of kerning etc. one often sees in books makes the punctuation almost illegible—concomitantly, thus so the text. There are many, many examples of this done by so-called professionals! 1.2 THE FACT THAT THE FONT/LAYOUT METRICS FOR THOSE TYPEFACES IS PRECISELY CORRECT AS SPECIFIED FOR THE TYPEFACE/FONT COMBINATION DOES NOT NECESSARILY ENSURE GOOD READABILITY. THESE BOOKS WOULD BE BETTER OFF BY INCREASING INTER-SENTENCE SPACING [ALBEIT NOT NECESSARILY TWO FULL SPACES]. SAME ALSO APPLIES TO THE INAPPROPRIATELY SMALL INTER-PARAGRAPH SPACING. 2. Many others who I have observed over the years and who use two spaces after a stop also consider the matter a readability issue—double spacing often makes text more readable/understandable! Fact! 2.1 If I type a large document with single spacing after the stop and then I read it back some weeks afterwards (after I've forgotten the fine detail of what I typed), then do the same with identical text but with double spacing, then I find the double spacing considerably easier to read. In my case, it's a fact (perhaps for Farhad Manjoo there's no difference but he shouldn't criticise those who do find the increased spacing better). 2.2 You might say the 'test' in 2.1 is fanciful and that I'm lying about it, as who would ever bother doing a comparison like that in the first place? However, I can assure you that such comparisons do happen. Often, I can have two identical documents even down to the font and almost to the layout. It mostly occurs when 'copy' goes into web pages or HTML editors that are set to automatically convert double spacing to single [i.e.: the page defaults to single spacing]. In fact, such comparisons happen quite regularly. 2.3 By insisting that I read 'single-spaced' documents then Farhad Manjoo would effectively disadvantage me because of my 'handicap'. There are many other typists out there who expedience reading text the same way I do. So what to do with us all? Perhaps shoot us, or put us all down like a sick dog? 2.4 In my case, the double spacing after a stop/colon is so ingrained that I can get rather annoyed and irritated when posting to web sites that automatically convert from 'double' to 'single' space when posted. Sometimes there is no way around the problem but often there is. use ALT-255 or another Unicode blank symbol to insert the extra blank. If enough of us did that then the nastily little authoritarian people who write code for such pages might eventually get the message! 3. Farhad Manjoo seems to spend precious little time discussing the very real effect 'double spacing after a stop' has when the typeface and its fonts are changed. Sometimes double spacing look awkward and often it does not depending on which typeface is used. Use a modern typing font such as Calibri and it hardly matters. This is a far too detailed a subjects cover here, suffice to say, different typefaces and different weights have a psycho-visual impact on the reader—that's why we use different typefaces with various font weights, etc. 3.1 The fact, that Farhad Manjoo is 'blinded' by a page of 'spaces' between sentences when 'double-space after stop' is used means that he actually perceives the page in a different visual way as do many others do. If so, I can actually understand his problem. Like many, I DO NOT notice these 'spaces', for me the effect is the 'area-under-a-curve' stuff—the integrand if you like—which, overall, makes the page have better readability performance when double space is used. No more, no less! 3.2 If disturbing 'double-space after stop' 'spaces' on a page cause Farhad Manjoo so much bother, then what does he do when the line spacing/line height is changed to double or even triple height. What does he do when the character spacing is adjusted or the kerning not set to his liking? It must be a nightmare for him—he must go around examining pages for "correctness"—and if they're "wrong" his distraction must make it difficult for him to comprehend the page. [Actually, I can understand typeface/layout distraction. I'll often not buy a book if the typeface / fonts etc. are very poorly executed (but it does have to be bad, usually the content is more important and overrules my resistance). 3.3 Can Farhad Manjoo tell me how he copes with automatically justified text [i.e.: text with no ragged right]? Often such text can look truly horrible, nevertheless, it is a standard layout methodology used and accepted by Graphic artists and fontographers. Does this mean that because it's "officially" part of the layout 'canon' then Farhad Manjoo will fully accept it even though it is distractingly ugly? 3.4 Graphic artists and fontographers, etc. aren't the right people to judge the single/double spacing after stop rule/issue. These people are trained to notice the finest details with respect to the printed page and thus have a far too critical an eye. 3.4.1 The average user rarely notices 'typeface issues' at the 'minutiae' level, in fact I'm often horrified by the typeface/font 'sins' that so many are actually capable of committing. 3.4.2 I know, I am very fussy (in fact pedantic) about the typefaces and font weights that I use. I select them very carefully. Nevertheless, I'm not as fixed in my views as some professionals who work with type on a daily basis are. I am currently working on a long report. Considerable effort went into selecting the margins, footnote size, main heading (Aharoni 13pt), sub-headings (Aharoni, 10pt), main text (Calibri 10.5pt) block-text quotes (Rockwell 9 & 9.5), footers (Calibri 9). This attention to detail shows that I am sensitive to the issues of typefaces and layout, and it's why I reckon people who whinge and complain about the 'double spacing after stop' matter are just overly obsessive. 3.4.3 Why would I take the time to respond in so much detail to Farhad Manjoo post unless I was reasonably obsessive? Well, even though I accept and understand the purity—or should I sanctity—of the fontographer's typeface metrics, and, ipso facto, that I also understand that 'double spaces after stop' technically violates the aesthetics of these metrics, that it is such a small and trivial (but often useful) matter in the greater scheme of things that I consider it almost unworthy of discussion. Simply, if I'm obsessed with such trivial details and it doesn't worry me one iota, then that Farhad Manjoo and his ilk in a special class of their own. QED. 4. Microsoft Word has a setup setting which automatically enforces 'double spaces between sentences'—when set, put in a single space or three spaces and the grammar checker kicks in with a wiggly underline! If Microsoft took the trouble to provide the option in Word then clearly many use it and find it acceptable! 4.1 One of the reasons I do not use OpenOffice/LibreOffice very often is that it DOES NOT ENFORCE the 'double space after a stop between sentences'! LibreOffice developers take note! Stop shooting yourselves in the collective foot and give users the options they want!

15 points by ALee 10y ago

"Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s."

...or not. I do it, likely will continue, and still do use monospace fonts. What will happen is people will largely center on one or another, have their reasons, with a majority doing single space. As for caps lock, clearly the author has not dirtied their refined hands on many numerical control systems. Oh, the shame and horror! Sans the ongoing lectures about what "we want" as writers, one space would probably be adopted far more rapidly. Sometimes we want flow, sometimes we want a pause, and we may want a lot of things not necessarily in line with style purists best efforts. TL;DR (complete with pretentious semicolon) I'm so sorry this trivia is elevated to such a point of concern. I feel you. Really. Ahem. (Pause intended, made explicit as HN renders with one space -a fine solution.)

flukus 10y ago

TIL a lot of people use two spaces and are very passionate about it. I've never heard of this in my life.

amingilani 10y ago
And how does their autocorrect not flag this?
Ntrails 10y ago
I was told to do it as a child, I've never thought about it since. When I wrote letters, incidentally, I would also probably leave more space between full stops and new sentences than I would between words? Since his main argument is "nobody uses monospaced fonts" but my first action upon starting a new job is to change all the text defaults to be consolas I feel fine about my behaviour.
- flukus 10y ago
  Is it an american thing? Or maybe an age thing? As I was going through school a lot of this stuff (any right alignment, commas after dear sir, etc) were being dropped. The only one that sunk it was typing out full names for numbers, one and twenty-two instead of 1 and 22, but I only stick to that up to ten, not 1000 like I was taught.
  - Ntrails 10y ago
    Dunno, I'm English so it's not an American thing. I don't even ever remember being taught it specifically but obviously I was because I sure as hell didn't make it up myself :p

makecheck 10y ago

I think it is far easier to read with two spaces, even in proportional fonts; on web pages I even add a Unicode non-breaking space after the period so that the browser will not absorb it.

DerekL 10y ago
What you should do instead is use an en or em space. Some people put a regular space and then a non-breaking space after the period. But this is a really bad idea, because if the line is broken after the sentence, the non-breaking space is attached to the start of the next sentence, so it gets indented.
- makecheck 10y ago
  Non-breaking is much more convenient. On the Mac I can use Option-space to insert a non-breaking space and continue, whereas another variant of space would require something more (like a key palette). And I attach the non-breaking space to the period, followed by a normal space so wrapping seems fine.
- milesrout 10y ago
  No, what you should do is just put a space or two spaces. You should not try to reinvent typography. Two spaces means that if software wants to try to find sentences, it can easily do so, but will still render properly (as a single space) if not.

intopieces 10y ago

>When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong-that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space-the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know. Pretty rich talk from someone who used a hyphen in place of an em dash.

anotheryou 10y ago
Do you put spaces around em dashes—those of this kind? edit: Ah, in german we use a shorter one with spaces – like this. Still longer than a minus: -
- intopieces 10y ago
  I usually do put spaces around them, but that is a style choice I consider less important than the length of the dash itself. The style the author uses is indistinguishable from a hyphenated noun, like "hurdy-gurdy."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

Camillo 10y ago

The double-space just says "I was raised in the jungle by wild typists, and did not lay my eyes upon a printed book until the age of 25".

repsilat 10y ago

Well, now that browsers and everything else will ignore the second space we can focus on more important things, like which one computers prefer. And computers probably prefer two spaces so they can tell acronyms and abbreviations from the ends of sentences. I'll never get used to typing that second space, but it beats a single newline or bad kerning or whatever the alternative is.

ce4 10y ago

Obligatory xkcd on kerning :) https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/

Nelkins 10y ago

ha, Even with this article being from 2014, I find it funny to see that the author continued to pen jeremiads on the epidemic of two spaces in modern society for years[1]. Sort of an unusual (and in my mind, pretentious) cause to take up. In any case, it's not true. If you want to use two spaces after a period, continue to do so--I do. Here's a long rebuttal on why two spaces after a period doesn't really matter[2] and the corresponding HN discussion from four years ago[3]. [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/... [2] http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324 http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385448 Edit: I typed this comment with two spaces after each period. Try it yourself, you'll see the rendered HTML only has one space. This is a solved problem folks, just do it however you like! Edit2: Just realized that even though this Business Insider article is dated 2014, the article is the same one the author wrote in 2011.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
You can continue to do so. But your readers will hate you if you go to the extra effort of adding non-breaking spaces, because many people find two spaces in electronic text painfully distracting. The "rule" is literally a waste of space. It's like playing an annoying harpsichord accompaniment in the background to all your voice and video calls. The history is beside the point. The reality is the web has its own de facto standards enforced in HTML, as does modern typography, as does email. Obscure forgotten metal print layout traditions from the 18th and 19th centuries are a historical footnote now, and not relevant to any of the above.

Yohohoman 10y ago

I personally have no idea about typography, but I use double space after a period for semantics --- as a sentence terminator. because, you know, there are languages where periods are used not only for terminating sentences. as a side note --- capitalising the first letter of a sentence is a convention similar to putting two spaces between sentences. why does the author do this?

rleigh 10y ago

Emacs puts two spaces after a period when reflowing paragraphs. So I've been going with that default for years as the path of least resistance. Since it makes monospaced text slightly more readable and most rendered text output (TeX, Sphinx, Markdown etc.) ignore the additional space and omit it from their output, it doesn't have any significant detraction to me as an author, so I'll continue to live in the two space camp.

SamReidHughes 10y ago
In Emacs there's an option to change that.

hiperlink 10y ago

Steve Losh has some arguments for putting two: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/why-i-two-space/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/why-i-two-space/

sunstone 10y ago

In the days of ink and paper the extra space had a measurable cost that accountants considered unconscionable. Those days are gone but the sentiment continues as a ghost of past technologies in the minds of those who can't move on.

unsignedint 10y ago

I have had numerous occasions discussing this topics b with my peers before and concluded this is really like a religion and will be very difficult to convince anyone to change to another. (I use one space myself.) It causes bit of side effects to have two spaces after period, like if one of them rolling into beginning of a new line and what they ought to do is to define those spaces as a non-breakable spaces, to indicate they shouldn't be separated, but I don't see this praciticed too often.

ionised 10y ago

Weird. Never heard of this two-space thing before, at least not growing up and working in the UK.

hilbert42 10y ago

""Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know. Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. " I really think this guy Farhad Manjoo is trying to buy an argument where one doesn't exist. Perhaps he's practicing for April Fools' Day which isn't far off! In his aforementioned quote, either he fails to justify his statements/claims or he covers a lot of mileage to prove minor points, same goes for the rest of his post. Sure, he has links to references and that fine (and the ones I looked at I didn't dispute,)—however that's not the most significant point. Just because someone or authority dictates or pontificates from upon high that something is this or that, or is supposed to be a certain way etc. doesn't give that person or anything he says higher authority or even any credibility whatsoever. Moreover, often so-called 'orthodoxy' can actually be wrong or misinterpreted. That said, professional standards are very important, so is the craft and experience of the artisan. However, 'double spacing after a stop between sentences' simply doesn't drop into this category, it's a lower-order exercise. It is not as if the typist who puts in a 'double-stop' is 'performing' at the level of a Graphic artists or typesetter does when he/she say typesets a novel in Palatino for general market release. If the typist does worry thus, then I'd humbly suggest that he/she is overly obsessed about the matter or has some kind of fetish about it. (No, I'm not being derogatory here as I actually understand the issue. Let me give you an example. When, say, I'm in a supermarket checkout aisle that has a checkout sign to the effect "People with less than 12 items" then I have a strong urge to cross out 'less' and replace it with the correct word 'fewer' but I never act upon it.) It boils down to this, I am a very fussy person but nowhere as fussy as Farhad Manjoo, he strikes me as bordering on the obsessive. The Issues as I perceive them: --------------------------------------- 1. I use 'double spacing after a stop between sentences' and a colon because it emphases the stop or colon itself. That's to say, it strengthens the action of the punctuation and makes the page more readable. Moreover, I have done so for years, and I have no intention of stopping. 1.1 Often seriffed fonts with various degrees of kerning etc. one often sees in books makes the punctuation almost illegible—concomitantly, thus so the text. There are many, many examples of this done by so-called professionals! 1.2 THE FACT THAT THE FONT/LAYOUT METRICS FOR THOSE TYPEFACES IS PRECISELY CORRECT AS SPECIFIED FOR THE TYPEFACE/FONT COMBINATION DOES NOT NECESSARILY ENSURE GOOD READABILITY. THESE BOOKS WOULD BE BETTER OFF BY INCREASING INTER-SENTENCE SPACING [ALBEIT NOT NECESSARILY TWO FULL SPACES]. SAME ALSO APPLIES TO THE INAPPROPRIATELY SMALL INTER-PARAGRAPH SPACING. 2. Many others who I have observed over the years and who use two spaces after a stop also consider the matter a readability issue—double spacing often makes text more readable/understandable! Fact! 2.1 If I type a large document with single spacing after the stop and then I read it back some weeks afterwards (after I've forgotten the fine detail of what I typed), then do the same with identical text but with double spacing, then I find the double spacing considerably easier to read. In my case, it's a fact (perhaps for Farhad Manjoo there's no difference but he shouldn't criticise those who do find the increased spacing better). 2.2 You might say the 'test' in 2.1 is fanciful and that I'm lying about it, as who would ever bother doing a comparison like that in the first place? However, I can assure you that such comparisons do happen. Often, I can have two identical documents even down to the font and almost to the layout. It mostly occurs when 'copy' goes into web pages or HTML editors that are set to automatically convert double spacing to single [i.e.: the page defaults to single spacing]. In fact, such comparisons happen quite regularly. 2.3 By insisting that I read 'single-spaced' documents then Farhad Manjoo would effectively disadvantage me because of my 'handicap'. There are many other typists out there who expedience reading text the same way I do. So what to do with us all? Perhaps shoot us, or put us all down like a sick dog? 2.4 In my case, the double spacing after a stop/colon is so ingrained that I can get rather annoyed and irritated when posting to web sites that automatically convert from 'double' to 'single' space when posted. Sometimes there is no way around the problem but often there is. use ALT-255 or another Unicode blank symbol to insert the extra blank. If enough of us did that then the nastily little authoritarian people who write code for such pages might eventually get the message! 3. Farhad Manjoo seems to spend precious little time discussing the very real effect 'double spacing after a stop' has when the typeface and its fonts are changed. Sometimes double spacing look awkward and often it does not depending on which typeface is used. Use a modern typing font such as Calibri and it hardly matters. This is a far too detailed a subjects cover here, suffice to say, different typefaces and different weights have a psycho-visual impact on the reader—that's why we use different typefaces with various font weights, etc. 3.1 The fact, that Farhad Manjoo is 'blinded' by a page of 'spaces' between sentences when 'double-space after stop' is used means that he actually perceives the page in a different visual way as do many others do. If so, I can actually understand his problem. Like many, I DO NOT notice these 'spaces', for me the effect is the 'area-under-a-curve' stuff—the integrand if you like—which, overall, makes the page have better readability performance when double space is used. No more, no less! 3.2 If disturbing 'double-space after stop' 'spaces' on a page cause Farhad Manjoo so much bother, then what does he do when the line spacing/line height is changed to double or even triple height. What does he do when the character spacing is adjusted or the kerning not set to his liking? It must be a nightmare for him—he must go around examining pages for "correctness"—and if they're "wrong" his distraction must make it difficult for him to comprehend the page. [Actually, I can understand typeface/layout distraction. I'll often not buy a book if the typeface / fonts etc. are very poorly executed (but it does have to be bad, usually the content is more important and overrules my resistance). 3.3 Can Farhad Manjoo tell me how he copes with automatically justified text [i.e.: text with no ragged right]? Often such text can look truly horrible, nevertheless, it is a standard layout methodology used and accepted by Graphic artists and fontographers. Does this mean that because it's "officially" part of the layout 'canon' then Farhad Manjoo will fully accept it even though it is distractingly ugly? 3.4 Graphic artists and fontographers, etc. aren't the right people to judge the single/double spacing after stop rule/issue. These people are trained to notice the finest details with respect to the printed page and thus have a far too critical an eye. 3.4.1 The average user rarely notices 'typeface issues' at the 'minutiae' level, in fact I'm often horrified by the typeface/font 'sins' that so many are actually capable of committing. 3.4.2 I know, I am very fussy (in fact pedantic) about the typefaces and font weights that I use. I select them very carefully. Nevertheless, I'm not as fixed in my views as some professionals who work with type on a daily basis are. I am currently working on a long report. Considerable effort went into selecting the margins, footnote size, main heading (Aharoni 13pt), sub-headings (Aharoni, 10pt), main text (Calibri 10.5pt) block-text quotes (Rockwell 9 & 9.5), footers (Calibri 9). This attention to detail shows that I am sensitive to the issues of typefaces and layout, and it's why I reckon people who whinge and complain about the 'double spacing after stop' matter are just overly obsessive. 3.4.3 Why would I take the time to respond in so much detail to Farhad Manjoo post unless I was reasonably obsessive? Well, even though I accept and understand the purity—or should I sanctity—of the fontographer's typeface metrics, and, ipso facto, that I also understand that 'double spaces after stop' technically violates the aesthetics of these metrics, that it is such a small and trivial (but often useful) matter in the greater scheme of things that I consider it almost unworthy of discussion. Simply, if I'm obsessed with such trivial details and it doesn't worry me one iota, then that Farhad Manjoo and his ilk in a special class of their own. QED. 4. Microsoft Word has a setup setting which automatically enforces 'double spaces between sentences'—when set, put in a single space or three spaces and the grammar checker kicks in with a wiggly underline! If Microsoft took the trouble to provide the option in Word then clearly many use it and find it acceptable! 4.1 One of the reasons I do not use OpenOffice/LibreOffice very often is that it DOES NOT ENFORCE the 'double space after a stop between sentences'! LibreOffice developers take note! Stop shooting yourselves in the collective foot and give users the options they want!