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The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hprotagonist 6y agomonospace source text: two spaces. WYSIWYG or compiled final output: the layout engine knows how to adjust keming better than i do, and will strip out or adjust space distances to look “right” no matter how many spaces I type. So i might as well type two and maintain hand memory consistency. So as far as i’m concerned, it’s a no-op in practice. For myself i learned two-space long ago, my hands are unlikely to retrain themselves to type otherwise, and it’s probably a slight legibility help in docstrings and latex source. edit: as i edit this on my phone i realize that one place this doesn’t work is on an on-screen keyboard. There, typing the second space too quickly usually inserts another period!
- CrazyStat 6y agoSeveral years ago I started putting every sentence on a new line when I write LaTeX, as it makes diffs cleaner if I want to go back and compare versions of a document.
- StavrosK 6y agoI do the same but I noticed it feels very weird to write like that, it feels much more staccato, as if there's a bigger pause between each sentence. Nowadays I write paragraphs normally and then split the lines afterwards.
- hprotagonist 6y agowe’re all conditioned by twitter now, it should be fine! /s Now that you mention it though i bet there’s an easy macro to do this in emacs ...
- magicalhippo 6y agoFor the most part I do the same when writing emails. Appears to be a higher chance of people reading them that way. I don't write a lot of fluff though, and usually have two or three trimming passes before sending.
- layer8 6y agoI do the same in source documentation, to limit the portion that has to be reformatted when changing something in the middle.
- hprotagonist 6y agoi’d have trouble keeping line length limits in docstrings.
- layer8 6y agoIt doesn't mean that a sentence can't contain line breaks. It means that there's a line break after each sentence. This causes paragraph reformatting (for maintaining line length) to be restricted to the current sentence, instead of also affecting the following sentences.
- layer8 6y agoFor me two spaces in fixed-width fonts is too jarring, as the spaces themselves are significantly wider than in proportional fonts (relative to average letter width), and also the period glyph already adds horizontal space. For proportional fonts, on the other hand, two spaces would help the layout engine to distinguish between the end of a sentence and other uses of period-followed-by-space (abbreviations, mostly).
- Rygian 6y agoSomewhat amused by the "keming" you refer to. I assume it's tongue-in-cheek. :-) Double-space into period is a customizable feature of on-screen keyboards (at least Gboard).
- hprotagonist 6y agoyea that was an intentional typo :)
- hellojason 6y agoThere is a decent-sized subreddit called Keming[0], if anyone's interested. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/
- xiwenc 6y agoI'm surprised the article did not show the difference. Here it is: 1 space after period === I’ve written before about the effect of color gradients on reading, and how it goes against the findings of science that our words should be in a single color, usually black and usually on a near-white background, and usually presented in lines of a certain length. This is all a matter of tradition and style, not optimal information transfer. This standard does not work well for everyone. It’s why I thought, for a long time, that I didn’t like books. I wasn’t good at the mechanics of reading. When I found text-to-speech programs and actual audiobooks, it was like finally seeing the turtle in one of those Magic Eye posters that everyone else at the party saw hours ago. 2 spaces after period === I’ve written before about the effect of color gradients on reading, and how it goes against the findings of science that our words should be in a single color, usually black and usually on a near-white background, and usually presented in lines of a certain length. This is all a matter of tradition and style, not optimal information transfer. This standard does not work well for everyone. It’s why I thought, for a long time, that I didn’t like books. I wasn’t good at the mechanics of reading. When I found text-to-speech programs and actual audiobooks, it was like finally seeing the turtle in one of those Magic Eye posters that everyone else at the party saw hours ago. Personally I think the extra space does improve readability. I would advocate that the extra spacing should be handled at presentation time. Not as part of the content itself.
- downrightmike 6y agoThe extra space appears to let the sentence or thought stand on it's own. In school K-12 I was taught two spaces. College said only one.
- TheRealSteel 6y agoYep, in casual text conversations (i.e. chatting with friends) I sometimes use extra spaces between words or sentences as a stylistic choice to express tone.
- chrisfinazzo 6y agoFor my district, roughly K-8 encouraged 2 spaces but changed once I got to HS. I don't know if this was an artifact of teaching us to create bibliographies and citations in MLA Style or just for ease of editing. College and Grad School either didn't care or vehemently adhered to 1 space. APA Style and its variants seems reasonable to me, if only for the reason that it corrects a major flaw in AP - the lack of a serial comma.
- at_a_remove 6y agoNot that civilization would settle on such a thing to a degree where this would be dependable, but it would certainly help machine processing of text to understand that the two spaces indicates a new sentence, while some abbreviation with a period in it, then a space, does not represent the last word in a sentence. I still use two spaces at the end of a sentence in text messages. Pry them from my cold dead thumbs, etc.
- cosmiccatnap 6y agoWe all know in computer science it's all truncated anyway so one space was already decided upon a long time ago.
- Finnucane 6y ago"The two-space convention is left over from the days of typewriters." And that convention itself came about as an imitation of common 19th-century typesetting style, where more space after punctuation was still fairly normal. Technological and aesthetic changes--the adoption of Monotype and Linotype machines, and the influence of early book designers like Bruce Rogers--started a trend to more even spacing in typeset printed books.
- dnautics 6y agoIm not convinced that the two spaces thing is a typesetting artifact. If you look at the declaration of independence and the constitution, which weren't typeset, there are larger spaces between sentences than words.
- pw6hv 6y agoVim's default behavior is to put two spaces after a period when reformatting (for example with gq). If you prefer to keep one space instead of two you can use: set nojoinspaces
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6y agoTwo spaces should be a good rule for plain text formats, like Markdown or reStructuredText -- this way the parser can identify sentences and recognize the punctuation that ends an abbreviation vs the one that ends a sentence. (It's not that any parser is doing this currently, as far as I know.)
- oneeyedpigeon 6y agoHow would you handle the case in which a sentence ends with an abbreviation?
- dredmorbius 6y agoTwo spaces distinguish sentences. The abbreviation ends a sentence. It gets two spaces.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6y agoYou cannot get everything :) It will recognize this as the end of a sentence. One use case I was thinking of was to automatically make spaces after initials non-breaking, as in "R. P. McMurphy".
- oneeyedpigeon 6y agoI'm with HTML: screw how many spaces you want to pollute your words with, I'm replacing them all with a single space.
- OliverJones 6y agoFrom a guy who learned, in high school, to set type and print pages the old fashioned way, with metal type. It was retro even back then. But what an art! From my perspective the very concept of a typewriter-style space is an abomination wrought upon printing by the typewriter. Of course, typewriters were tremendously useful devices. I have no quarrel with them other than that. Spaces in the retro printer world: There's this concept of the "em" or quad space. It is a square hunk of metal the same height as the letters in the typeface. We still have it in   and css rules like line-height: 1.25em; We had five kinds of space in the lower case of the typeface. The "case" was a tray with dividers. If I remember right, they were -- em (quad)   -- en (half a quad)   -- thick ( ~ 1/4 of a quad) the ordinary space and in most fonts. -- middle ( ~ 1/5 of a quad)   -- thin ( ~ 1/6 of a quad in most typefaces) -- numberspace (the same width as the numerals in the typeface, an early nod to <pre> for tables. Notice that the precise widths of the thicks, middles, and thins are determined by the typeface's designer. Then and now. Our teacher told us to set up body copy with thicks between words. We then justified each line manually by putting two thins in place of a middle to add space, or one thin to remove space. Choosing where to adjust the space was an art. It was good to avoid rivers of space running down the page. (Adobe InDesign gives enough control to do this; I don't think other programs do.) AFTER SENTENCES, we used ens for most copy, and ems for poetry and that sort of thing. I am pretty sure the two-space typewriter convention grew out of printers' ens or ems after sentences. In the 21st century digital typefaces have contextual glyphs. That makes it easy for the FONT DESIGNER to choose the default spacing between sentences. That's as it should be. The rest of us should pass dot space to the font. The font designer "owns" legibility. I, for one, have had a heck of a time unlearning the dot space space sequence I learned in high-school typing class.
- blunte 6y agoTwo spaces, like the Oxford Comma, reduce ambiguity and aid in visually parsing text information. As a side benefit, that extra space can help software identify a sentence vs a line which contains something like Mr. Bob. With a two-space system, Mr. Bob would be part of one sentence. In a one-space system, the software cannot tell if the sentence ends at Mr. with the next sentence beginning as "Bob ..."
- marcus_holmes 6y agoIs this just an American thing? I was educated in the UK and it never once came up (we use a single space), nor have I heard of it anywhere except online conversations with Americans.
- monetus 6y agoI'm not sure about it being restricted to americans, but yes, that is how I was taught in public schools. I'm from the U.S.
- twic 6y agoI've come across it in the UK. I remember a friend's mother, born in ~1940, insisting on it.
- kayodelycaon 6y agoThe only time I got told to use two spaces was by my dad. Literally everywhere else, it was single space. In school, two spaces was considered bad grammar and would get marked in red ink.
- gnabgib 6y agoIt is not, also educated in the UK and two spaces were required. HTML makes it hard to double space, and we get a lot of reading material via the web now, so maybe this is why single space is the world standard. It is harder to read, but other aspects contribute here too (overly wide or narrow columns, bad contrast, bad font choice, late-bound style/fonts/js/ads that move what you're reading, dancing hamsters)
- marcus_holmes 6y agointeresting! where were you educated (mine was private school, gen X, SW England)? Is this a class thing, or a regional thing, or a generational thing, or what?
- gnabgib 6y agoState - SW England & Catholic - NE Scotland. I'm not sure? But I first started (outside of school) on a typewriter, and terminals were all fixed width (Acorn, Amiga, BBC) - which the argument goes is where it came from (although the typesetting comment by @OliverJones suggests otherwise). I wonder if perhaps it was just a function of the teacher you had? The world was less connected (even now parts of education are individual preferences rather than rules). Oxford comma, punctuation inside or outside brackets, etc vs et cetra vs &ct
- mcguire 6y agoFranklyIprefertheancienttraditionofusingneitherpunctuationnorspacesCapitalizationisoptional
- jbaber 6y agoDon't forget the .nodehportsuob
- dredmorbius 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
- boublepop 6y agoI+personally+quite+like+the+word+dividers+used+in+runes.
- krupan 6y agoEmacs has forward/backward-sentence (alt-e/alt-a) commands, but you have to have two spaces after a period for it to know where sentences begin/end.
- twic 6y agoRandom facts. French puts a half-space before any punctuation mark with two parts: https://crowdagger.github.io/textes/articles/heuristique.html https://crowdagger.github.io/textes/articles/heuristique.htm... Although in Quebec they only do it before colons: https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tcdnstyl-chap?lang=eng&lettr=chapsect17&info0=17.07 https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tcdnstyl-chap?lang=eng&let... German used to put spaces before punctuation, now doesn't, and some guy on Usenet came up with a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken
- sunstone 6y agoLet the bike shedding begin.