4 ms·

I'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 re

by xiwenc 6y ago

I'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 ago
The 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 ago
  Yep, 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 ago
  For 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.
falcolas 6y ago
Part of the problem is that the period is overloaded. Massively overloaded. And not in a BNF (or other regular syntax) style that makes sentence breaks mechanically identifiable. Even a period-space-capital method is far from foolproof, Mr. Anderson.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  This raises an interesting consideration for typesetting engines like TeX. Maybe we should only use the full stop character for sentence breaks, and to typeset initialisms use a directive like \initials{USA}. This also allows the style/template to determine whether (or not) to intercalate the initials with full stop characters when typesetting the document.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
throwaway2245 6y ago
> Personally I think the extra space does improve readability. In the way that I read, I find that two spaces here highlights the first word(s) of the sentence, and that makes it much slower for me to parse the meaning of the sentence as a whole. "I've written before about", "This", "This", "It's why I thought", "I", "When I found" - usually I want to skip over these words and get to the meaning: not have them be identified as a point of focus.
- cecilpl2 6y ago
  I find it allows my eyes to easily find the beginning of the next sentence which allows me to read faster, since I can scan information in sentence-long chunks, then pause briefly to process the meaning before scanning the next sentence.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    I'd toyed with CSS first-child, first-line, and first-letter classesva ways back ... and foud that especially for '"cards-type" formats, these made finding and distinguishing new posts far clearer. The style is (largely) incorporated in https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius. An ello example with screenshots; https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/QGKKdiuqUw6O7ROl-V3uJA https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/QGKKdiuqUw6O7ROl-V3uJA
michaelcampbell 6y ago
> I would advocate that the extra spacing should be handled at presentation time. Not as part of the content itself. TeX/LaTeX attempts to do this, IIRC. I know there are sigils to force that one way or the other when it guesses wrong. I'm a 2-spacer, being of a certain age and having learned to type in school on an actual typewriter. I'm also heavily invested in the Web, and I get that multiple spaces are folded into 1 on HTML. I still do 2.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  I had a grudging and bitter period, decades back when writing a lot of HTML, of putting a non-breaking space after a regular space finishing a sentence, just so I could get that extra space visible. I finally folded on that one.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  > I'm a 2-spacer, being of a certain age and having learned to type in school on an actual typewriter. Yes, from posts with double-spaces I can usually tell that the author is over a certain age (I would put them at baby-boomer or near baby-boomer). I am guilty of having been taught that way when taking Typing class in school as well. I have since dropped it though since we no longer live in a monospace world (I know, I hear you saying, "Speak for yourself," but I am excepting coding).
  - michaelcampbell 6y ago
    I'm fine with proportionally spaced fonts when not coding. I'm also in love with extra space at the end of sentences; HTML based displays took the easy way out, there.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
teorema 6y ago
Fwiw, I've never really liked two spaces after a period and rereading that confirms it. To me it causes some mild confusion (if that's the right word — maybe too strong a word) with paragraph breaks. It's just too big a gap. For me it decreases readability if anything.
- Retric 6y ago
  The dot symbol has ambiguity without extra spaces. ... Andrew W. Kent ... ... Andrew W. Kent ... Mean different things. It’s rarely an issue, and not necessarily used correctly, but it is still a valuable tool.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Clearlyweshouldresurrectscriptocontnua. Whitespace is frippery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
pnw_hazor 6y ago
I switched to single spacing about 15 years ago when I was reading about typography for legal writing. Now I find two-spacing jarring. Also, when seeing two-spacing I somewhat irrationally get the feeling that the writer is old-fashioned or uninformed. I understand the claim that two-spacing makes it easier to read because it separates sentences. But that is what the period does. Sentences are supposed to flow together. Paragraphs are for separating. And from the linked article: “I’ve gotten a lot of flak for using a mono-spaced font (Courier New) in the study,” said Johnson. Flak? I think using monospace font invalidates the conclusion of study.
teilo 6y ago
Yes, this does need to be at presentation time. In monospace, this may make sense, but that's not how text layout works. A space is dynamically sized. Granted, there are overloading issues, but we have had decades to refine text layout engines to account for this. Major text layout systems, including those used in publishing, need to be able to dynamically adjust spacing based upon context. Software such as InDesign does this, and it is a standard part of workflow to replace all double-spaces with single-spaces.
gumby 6y ago
> Personally I think the extra space does improve readability. I would advocate that the extra spacing should be handled at presentation time. Extra space between sentences is standard in English typesetting (spacing in printed text is language-specific BTW) precisely for readability: it lets you, in general, read by sentence. The problems with deferring it to presentation are 1 - "raw"=ish text often is the presentation (consider just long text in a code comment -- and almost anything in the terminal) and 2 - you don't always write in text that is undergoing any kind of presentation processing in realtime (e.g. you're writing TeX, or Markdown for that matter). You want to be able to read it easily. The inverse is not a problem: a typesetting system can just coalesce spacing and make its own inter-sentence spacing decisions.

by xiwenc 6y ago

downrightmike 6y ago

The 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 ago
Yep, 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 ago
For 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.

falcolas 6y ago

Part of the problem is that the period is overloaded. Massively overloaded. And not in a BNF (or other regular syntax) style that makes sentence breaks mechanically identifiable. Even a period-space-capital method is far from foolproof, Mr. Anderson.

nerdponx 6y ago
This raises an interesting consideration for typesetting engines like TeX. Maybe we should only use the full stop character for sentence breaks, and to typeset initialisms use a directive like \initials{USA}. This also allows the style/template to determine whether (or not) to intercalate the initials with full stop characters when typesetting the document.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

throwaway2245 6y ago

> Personally I think the extra space does improve readability. In the way that I read, I find that two spaces here highlights the first word(s) of the sentence, and that makes it much slower for me to parse the meaning of the sentence as a whole. "I've written before about", "This", "This", "It's why I thought", "I", "When I found" - usually I want to skip over these words and get to the meaning: not have them be identified as a point of focus.

cecilpl2 6y ago
I find it allows my eyes to easily find the beginning of the next sentence which allows me to read faster, since I can scan information in sentence-long chunks, then pause briefly to process the meaning before scanning the next sentence.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  I'd toyed with CSS first-child, first-line, and first-letter classesva ways back ... and foud that especially for '"cards-type" formats, these made finding and distinguishing new posts far clearer. The style is (largely) incorporated in https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius. An ello example with screenshots; https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/QGKKdiuqUw6O7ROl-V3uJA https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/QGKKdiuqUw6O7ROl-V3uJA

michaelcampbell 6y ago

> I would advocate that the extra spacing should be handled at presentation time. Not as part of the content itself. TeX/LaTeX attempts to do this, IIRC. I know there are sigils to force that one way or the other when it guesses wrong. I'm a 2-spacer, being of a certain age and having learned to type in school on an actual typewriter. I'm also heavily invested in the Web, and I get that multiple spaces are folded into 1 on HTML. I still do 2.

at_a_remove 6y ago
I had a grudging and bitter period, decades back when writing a lot of HTML, of putting a non-breaking space after a regular space finishing a sentence, just so I could get that extra space visible. I finally folded on that one.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
> I'm a 2-spacer, being of a certain age and having learned to type in school on an actual typewriter. Yes, from posts with double-spaces I can usually tell that the author is over a certain age (I would put them at baby-boomer or near baby-boomer). I am guilty of having been taught that way when taking Typing class in school as well. I have since dropped it though since we no longer live in a monospace world (I know, I hear you saying, "Speak for yourself," but I am excepting coding).
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  I'm fine with proportionally spaced fonts when not coding. I'm also in love with extra space at the end of sentences; HTML based displays took the easy way out, there.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

teorema 6y ago

Fwiw, I've never really liked two spaces after a period and rereading that confirms it. To me it causes some mild confusion (if that's the right word — maybe too strong a word) with paragraph breaks. It's just too big a gap. For me it decreases readability if anything.

Retric 6y ago
The dot symbol has ambiguity without extra spaces. ... Andrew W. Kent ... ... Andrew W. Kent ... Mean different things. It’s rarely an issue, and not necessarily used correctly, but it is still a valuable tool.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Clearlyweshouldresurrectscriptocontnua. Whitespace is frippery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

pnw_hazor 6y ago

I switched to single spacing about 15 years ago when I was reading about typography for legal writing. Now I find two-spacing jarring. Also, when seeing two-spacing I somewhat irrationally get the feeling that the writer is old-fashioned or uninformed. I understand the claim that two-spacing makes it easier to read because it separates sentences. But that is what the period does. Sentences are supposed to flow together. Paragraphs are for separating. And from the linked article: “I’ve gotten a lot of flak for using a mono-spaced font (Courier New) in the study,” said Johnson. Flak? I think using monospace font invalidates the conclusion of study.

teilo 6y ago

Yes, this does need to be at presentation time. In monospace, this may make sense, but that's not how text layout works. A space is dynamically sized. Granted, there are overloading issues, but we have had decades to refine text layout engines to account for this. Major text layout systems, including those used in publishing, need to be able to dynamically adjust spacing based upon context. Software such as InDesign does this, and it is a standard part of workflow to replace all double-spaces with single-spaces.

gumby 6y ago

> Personally I think the extra space does improve readability. I would advocate that the extra spacing should be handled at presentation time. Extra space between sentences is standard in English typesetting (spacing in printed text is language-specific BTW) precisely for readability: it lets you, in general, read by sentence. The problems with deferring it to presentation are 1 - "raw"=ish text often is the presentation (consider just long text in a code comment -- and almost anything in the terminal) and 2 - you don't always write in text that is undergoing any kind of presentation processing in realtime (e.g. you're writing TeX, or Markdown for that matter). You want to be able to read it easily. The inverse is not a problem: a typesetting system can just coalesce spacing and make its own inter-sentence spacing decisions.