5 ms·
Two spaces between sentences makes this easy, and should be just as easy a habit as one sentence per line.
by dubya 4y ago
Two spaces between sentences makes this easy, and should be just as easy a habit as one sentence per line.
- kadoban 4y agoThat's about as unnatural for most people as newline per sentence, and has the added risk that you'll accidentally publish like that and it'll look weird. One per line would be _much_ harder to accidentally publish because it's more obvious.
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoTwo spaces between sentences is how I've always typed them, even if it's in HTML or MD or other forms that will condense them into a single space in the final render. The two spaces mark a clear intent to end a sentence instead of a period to punctuate an abbreviation.
- TheFreim 4y agoMany people learned to add two spaces to the end of each sentence which is now built in to their muscle memory. My father learned to type adding two spaces to the end of every sentence, they tried to teach that to me in computer class in middle school but since I had a lot of experience typing already without it I never felt motivated to change my habit to add two spaces. I never really saw the point, in most formats I can't see the two spaces.
- wongarsu 4y agoTwo spaces after each sentence comes from typewriters, where it supposedly looked better. On computers it made sense in the time of monospaced fonts, but with "modern" fonts being able to control the amount of space behind punctuation it's largely redundant.
- blowski 4y agoExcept for when you want to do diffs at the end of a sentence.
- avgcorrection 4y agoGood typography seems to dictate a wider space after a sentence than between words. So this is a typewriter habit to mimic that kind of thing (like the sibling noted).
- jhardy54 4y agoSome people might prefer two spaces, but my understanding is that all authorities on “good typography” have standardized on one space: https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences.html https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences....
- avgcorrection 4y agoInteresting. I definitely respect Butterick’s opinions on typography.
- harshreality 4y agoRendering engines can do anything they want. The question is about source representation only, for semantic purposes. That has nothing to do with output representation. Even practicaltypography completely misses that distinction. You wouldn't publish anything with line breaks between sentences either. Double spacing or line breaks both work nicely for semantic purposes because html (or markdown which almost always ends up displayed somewhere as html) will ignore it. Any print publishing software in the 21st century should be aware that two spaces in a prose text source is a hint for a sentence break, and treat it appropriately. They often apply custom spacing (slightly more than 1, but nowhere close to 2) between sentences anyway. Without the two spaces, they have to algorithmically guess at sentences. You just won't notice when there are sentence detection errors, unless you're a typography fanatic; who's going to notice 1 space instead of 1.2 or whatever the optimum happens to be?
- sam_bristow 4y agoMaybe I'm just being slow this morning, but isn't the fullstop the indication of the end of the sentence? What extra information is encoded by fullstop + 2 spaces?
- dubya 4y agoFor me it's a holdover from a high school typing class, but I find it useful. I mostly write in LaTeX which just ignores the extras. On the iphone, two spaces are replaced by a period and a space, which is quite handy.
- kadoban 4y agoYeah I believe this is a generational thing. I learned double-space as well, but pretty sure not long after me they stopped teaching that, and I've totally stopped doing it.
- ghaff 4y agoDouble spaces was the norm on (almost always monospaced font) typewriters [EDIT: in English]. I assume it lingered on computers until sometime in the 80s but was shifting especially once proportional fonts for written material (other than things like code of course) became the norm. I couldn't tell you when I switched.
- earth_walker 4y agoI was taught to use double spaces in highschool typing class (we used electric typewriters with the buffer off). In the ~35 years since I have only ever met a handful of people, all older than me, who did it in practice. I continued through university while using a computer to type things up, I'm pretty sure my thesis had double spaces after periods, written in WP. Once I graduated I dropped it pretty quickly. Was there an early version of Word's spell-check-on-the-fly that underlined double spaces, or am I miss-remembering?
- ghaff 4y ago>Was there an early version of Word's spell-check-on-the-fly that underlined double spaces, or am I miss-remembering? I don't remember that and I was a fairly early user of Word going back to DOS days although I rarely use it any longer.
- earth_walker 4y agoApparently you could set up one or two spaces depending on your preference, however recent versions of Word now mark double spaces as an error by default.
- usr1106 4y ago
- euroderf 4y agoI've seen two spaces listed as a "resumé don't-do" cos it marks you as an oldster.
- yellowapple 4y agoMy résumé is in LaTeX, so they literally would never know.
- antod 4y agoI am an oldster, but never used two spaces. Probably because I never did typing lessons at school (hell I don't think it was even an option at my schools - computers hardly featured either).
- avgcorrection 4y agoI used to write like that (even though I’m not an American or a former typewriter) but pressing double space got annoying after a while. :-)