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Space Invaders - Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.
- Semiapies 16y agoSo, most people he encounters deliberately do this, most people who don't also do this think that they should be, and yet he feels confident saying they're wrong. "Bold" is an understatement. It's a arbitrary convention either way, as he admits. Invoking "writers, editors, typographers, and others" means very little in the context of correspondence, personal or otherwise. I've been teaching myself Emacs and having decent success in teaching myself various shortcuts. Re-teaching myself to not put two spaces after a sentence in prose? Ha.
- serichsen 16y agoI think that the issue of text editing and typesetting should be held separate. When editing a text, I am operating on a character string. In my editor, I can jump forward and backwards over sentences. The editor can discern these periods from others because they are followed by two space characters. When typesetting a text, it gets a proportional font, and the space left empty between sentences is set as the typesetter wants resp. the typesetting rules dictate. Do not confuse "two space characters" of a character stream with "a double space" of typeset text. Of course, WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editing of text would need to be very much aware of such issues, but mostly is not. I think that WYSIWYG editing is a bad idea, anyway.
- mturmon 16y agoThe hugely important point, completely overlooked by the article, is: is the text in monospace or not? If it's monospace, two spaces typically looks better. That's why old-fashioned typewriter people use two spaces. If it's typeset, the number of spaces really should be taken care of by the justification system (as in TeX) and the point of the article is moot. Aside, this is the article at which I vowed to no longer read Manjoo. The S/N is too low.