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Hacker News eats the second space. Which is fine. I'm not saying that typesetters should show two spaces between sentences, rather the edict against typing tw
by KC8ZKF 9y ago
Hacker News eats the second space. Which is fine. I'm not saying that typesetters should show two spaces between sentences, rather the edict against typing two spaces between sentences is wrong. Two spaces even has a (small) amount of semantic information. i.e. "This is a full stop and not part of an acronym or radix point, etc."
- ScottBurson 9y agoIt's not Hacker News eating the space; it's actually how the browser renders text. That said, I agree. What I type into the computer is not typesetting commands; it's input to the renderer, whose job is to understand what I'm telling it and lay it out appropriately. So, putting one space after a period indicates an abbreviation rather than the end of a sentence; the renderer may or may not choose to lay these out differently, but at least it has the option.
- dredmorbius 9y agoHN could if it wanted to insert an <space> following a full stop. It doesn't. One reason being Mr. Twee I-don't-use-two-spaces-after-a-full-stop, that it's awfully hard to tell if "Mr. Twee" is a sentence end or not, or if "stop. It" is supposed to be something else. That is, in the typewritten manuscript, the double-space following the full stop carries meaning which the typesetting system (HN's HTML encoder, here), would have to guess at. Or, you know, there's another way. Those of us who learnt to type properly can tip it off with our fuddly double-spaces.
- dredmorbius 9y agoBingo on the semantic content. That's a point that seems utterly lost on most today. When I type, it's ASCII in vim. When I typeset, it's \LaTeX (or more often these days, Markdown). Which takes care of the fucking fiddly bits for me.