8 ms·

Why I Two-Space (2012)

35 points by behnamoh 4y ago

ggm 4y ago
I have never agreed with "two space is ugly" because I have always assumed em-space and en-space were being used in typography. It's the closest analogue.
- knaik94 4y ago
  The issue with that analogy is that even with em and en spaces, the "correct" way of using them is based on where you learned their function. For example, the American use of em vs en dash and the British use is different. The guidelines are based on style rules, they aren't even grammar rules.
  - ggm 4y ago
    In effect, style == "is ugly or not ugly" and grammar == "is wrong" and style is highly conditional on education, country of origin, and context. I am british, have used computer typesetting systems since the early 80s, but currently live in Australia which is caught between poles of british-centric and american-centric style guides. Most computer typesetting systems are written by Americans. To the extent they interpret "." as a sentence marker, what they do is therefore by origin of software heavily dominated by what the US marketplace in style expects. Most computer typesetting systems I use are contextually NOT WYSIWYG and involve embedding the markup and processing it through explicit steps. Whilst I believe these are more capable of being told "honour a different style" the style guides tend(ed) to reflect publishing paper journal constraints to space and style, not general writing style. So using T/ROFF with the -ms macros, or LaTeX with specific IEEE journal settings. Microsoft claims to honour locale pretty strongly. I have no idea if this leaks into style beyond s/z spelling and date-time.
remram 4y ago
Why not 3 spaces? > You might also infer from the article's tone that "you get to feel superior to those Neanderthals that use two spaces" I see we're very polite on your side: > don't worry, I'm using two spaces like a sane person
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Or a tab! Ducks.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Since you suggest that route, a semantic differentiator between inter-word, inter-element (e.g., "Dr. Gupta", "Sr. Director"), inter-sentence, and inter-paragraph whitespace could be argued for. We already have spaces, tabs, and non-breaking spaces (" " in HTML), for example. ASCII already has a number of field-specific terminators: STX, ETX, EOF, LF, FF, FS, GS, RS, US, etc. Though those tend to be little used. In terms of ease of use, existing standards, and ready interpretation, a doubled space as an inter-sentence indicator has numerous benefits.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  > Why not 3 spaces? The main point is that it’s useful for the token that separates words to be different from the one that separates sentences. So three spaces would have no advantage over two.
  - remram 4y ago
    That was just one of the many points in the article. It's actually not a point at all unless one uses Vim with the specified setting (which you can only do if all the text you edit uses two spaces).
gardenfelder 4y ago
2012. Dead link to his source: he does have a github.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Two spaces to distinguish between period used in Mr. and period for end of sentence is a compelling reason given in the post. Good for editor navigation. You can split on two spaces to count sentences for example, so code can make sense of it.
sfled 4y ago
My browser doesn't render two spaces in a row unless they're   .
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  This is a fundamental part of the article’s point.
- 83457 4y ago
  Technically, you only need one of those.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
It's what we learned in keyboarding class, so it is what I do.
- GoatOfAplomb 4y ago
  Nearly 30 years after keyboarding class, if I tried to change now, I think I'd spend the rest of my life tripping over the keys.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    I doubt it. I stopped after about 15 years of double-spacing. The human brain is a lot more malleable than "common sense" would indicate. Single space is as natural to me as double spacing ever was.
daguava 4y ago
I learned two space in keyboard classes but hated every second of it. It made no sense. And to a kid who loves to push authority I always asked "Why am I doing this arbitrary thing no-one can give evidence as to why?" I'm glad two-space died, and I no longer two-space. In my school it was simply used as an authority or power over the children by a typing teacher who was frustrated in a lot of things, but mostly in her marriage. Mrs. Botana - You were the most hated teacher at our school, and you telling us you recognized how hated you were solved nothing. Enjoy your two-space.
- mcswell 4y ago
  Two space is alive and well. At least it is for me.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- LMMojo 4y ago
  Just because you didn't understand why did not make her wrong. I'm also sure she was hated for things other than double-spacing.
  - daguava 4y ago
    She was hated for aggressively screaming at students and taking out her anger for the life events she professed to us BEFORE our class and teaching period started. Maybe you need to understand that this isn't YOUR experience and I'm accurately talking about a degenerate teaching professional who did their best to be an absolute scumfuck piece of shit.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      That experience ... has nothing to do with two-space sentence termination.
pooper 4y ago
I have a(n even worse) proposal: With markdown especially with version controlled text, start a new line for each new sentence. You can start doing this right now. Don't burden yourself with the thoughts of single space vs double space. Simply add a space after the period and press enter to start a new line after each sentence. Add an empty line to show that you are now in a new paragraph. My rationale is it will help version control software diff your text better. Thoughts?
- togaen 4y ago
  Yes, this is common practice in many orgs for that reason, as well as that it makes resolving merge conflicts easier.
- civilized 4y ago
  Poetry.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  This is the advantage of putting WYSWYG fully in the garbage where it belongs. It also lets you shuffle around sentences when editing which is nice.
- geraldcombs 4y ago
  This is recommended by the Asciidoctor team[1]. Along with making it easier to split and join paragraphs, it makes it easier to rearrange sentences. [1]https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-recommended-practices/#one-sentence-per-line https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-recommended-practices/...
- pronoiac 4y ago
  I'd avoid that trailing space. git will complain, a trailing doublespace can cause a linebreak, it's super inconspicuous, and that can trip people up.
- samatman 4y ago
  Yeah, I hate it. Spent too many years in pine, I will type prose at 78 column width until the day I die. Hopefully before that happens, change management tools will stop being completely moronic about diffing prose. But whether that happens or not: one line per sentence? Not a chance. Unless I'm making a point.
XorNot 4y ago
Just adopt my dad's method: randomly insert some amount of spaces before and after every period in a sentence.
hoosieree 4y ago
Chaotic Neutral doesn't stop at 2 spaces - embeds a non-trivial Whitespace[1] program after every sentence. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
knaik94 4y ago
Two spacing does not increase legibility of the information. That is the only meaningful metric I care about. If there are studies to show that two-spacing vs single spacing has a meaningful difference in how quickly a human parses or understands information, I will care about changing spacing. The author argues comfort, but because I am so used to single spacing, the two-spaced writing feels awkwardly spaced. I can't easily parse where sentences start and end. The other arguments are pointless. I recognize people still read print, but I can safely say that 90%+ of all of the reading I have done in the past month has been digital. I don't think most people choose vim over a word editor like google docs or microsoft word when writing. The most common ebooks I read are in the epub format, which is based on html. The only pdfs I read are technical papers that are in two column format. There doesn't seem to be a place where two spacing will make a difference. Looking at the page source shows the sentences are two-spaced. But that's not how any of the information is presented. If the author is used to it, there's no reason to change it. I believe that being trained to write the way most people write is more important. It doesn't take much to search+replace two blank spaces with one. Going in the opposite direction is only a little more involved with having to specify a punctuation so you don't end up double spacing every word as well.
- mcswell 4y ago
  Nor does one spacing increase legibility. I will continue to two space, because I think it looks better (and alas for those tools that ignore what I want because they thing they know better).
  - knaik94 4y ago
    I agree that continuing to use whatever you are used to is going to be the most productive.
- mdorazio 4y ago
  Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29691763/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29691763/ The effect is most pronounced for double spacers like myself, for whom the exact opposite is true of your first argument.
- 4y ago
dorkwood 4y ago
To me, two-space will often break the flow of the text while reading, because the gap between the period and the next word often exceeds the gap between the current line and the next line down. The gestalt theory of perception explains how we mentally group objects by their proximity. If the next word is closer to the bottom line than it is to the period that came before it, then the hierarchy of connection is broken. I haven't done a study, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it would take slightly more cognitive load to rearrange that hierarchy in your head. I believe this may be why some people perceive two-space as "ugly". It also explains why text with a too-small line height is equally unpleasant.
- davidmurdoch 4y ago
  I can't read technical matter written with two spaces. My brain inserts a long pause. I can't comprehend it, at least not without intentional extra mental effort. It's really weird and frustrating. I can read my 6 year old's scribble handwriting though. Haha
hkon 4y ago
His answer is that he uses Vim
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Vim's sentence-aware navigation is a strong argument, though it's hardly the only text editor which does so, and for which two-spacing affords benefits.
2devnull 4y ago
No mention of tactile or auditory feedback for the writer, which I suspect matters. A space between sentences is read differently, with a slight pause, compared to spaces between words. Writers should write that way too, and double spacing would support that by providing subtle auditory and tactile cues, full stop.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
Whether I 2-space or not, the more important thing is, I would never try to tell you what to do over something so trivial. Whichever way I prefer to write, or read, it doesn't make enough difference as a reader to justify even mentioning it, let alone screeding about it. Anyone writing, complaining, even merely picking a side out loud and trying to defend one side in forums like this, are all automatically wrong because of that, regardless which side, regardless what their arguments are. The far worse crime than being in the wrong about double spacing, is feeling that you even have any valid place trying to dictate something like that to anyone else. It's not like the Oxford Comma. ;)
- knaik94 4y ago
  I don't agree with the tone of the original article but I do think we should discuss our preferences. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion on it. There's a difference between opinionated suggestions and arrogant mandates. This forum does a good job avoiding arrogant mandates.
- pestatije 4y ago
  Right, tabs vs spaces anyone? Indentation or braces? Bring it to the max and you'll see people ready to kill for a line in a map.
- KolenCh 4y ago
  I really hate this kind of "I don't care" logic floating among hackers or even just scientists. If I'm to argue, I'd start by pointing out the amount of space is not an integer. So arguing 1 or 2 is already wrong. Kerning of the font take cares about the spacing you have there. So the advice of using 1 space is really that it is understood that you have a single space after period, and the designer take that expectation into the kerning decision. The bottom line to me is that if you can't publish a book via a "traditional" publisher using that typographical decision then it is very likely to be wrong. Argue all you want about why you don't care about that. But for many people that reflects on the care/effort you put into your work, and likely I shouldn't care about work like this. The other thing I hate much is the trivialization, which is related to the "I don't care" culture. From my experience, many things are trivial at first glance. But it is likely wrong. Most things are very complicated with a lot of subtleties involved. Seeing them as trivial is often a sign that they really don't understand the subject very well.
defanor 4y ago
I learned about two-spacing only in my 20s, initially thinking that it's interesting but not very useful. Now it just looks like a cute topic to argue about and to have a strong opinion on, or to speculate about conspiring two-spacers, while being generally harmless. Unlike tabs or inferior text editors. As if all the important issues are solved, tabs are eradicated, and it's left to argue about the number of spaces.
kotlin2 4y ago
You’d need to look at the source to notice the double spaces… because HTML collapses white space
Slackwise 4y ago
Two-spacing is from the era of typewriters. Typerwriters had monospaced typefaces because of how they operated. One space didn't work well enough if the period is rendered center of the type block. To work visually for prose, you'd have had to shift it leftwards so it hugs up against the end of a sentence, leaving a wider gap afterwards. But then you'd end up with awkward decimal points for numbers.... so instead we decided to just use two spaces instead. So, it's obviously fine to two-space if you're using a typewriter. It's therefor also fine if you're writing in a monospace/fixed-width font. But don't do it with proportional width fonts! They are designed with various hints in place to render appropriately as one should typeset them, adjusting spacing between various letters, and of course rendering periods and decimal points correctly, contextually! HTML will also ignore extra spaces, accordingly. Word processors will either highlight consecutive spaces as a typo or even auto-correct as you type. So I guess not much worry here if it's a habit.
- lisper 4y ago
  I beg to differ. Computers should serve humans, not the other way around. Humans should not be burdened with the cognitive load of having to worry about different rules for typing depending on what font they are using. Besides, the same text can be rendered in different fonts at different times. The Right Answer here is for the software that renders text to do the Right Thing no matter how many spaces the user types after a period. HTML already does this so there is an existence proof that this is possible.
- cakoose 4y ago
  > It's therefor also fine if you're writing in a monospace/fixed-width font. This is the standard explanation I see everywhere, but I don't get it. With two spaces, the gap after a period is longer than a gap after a comma. Why is that "obviously fine" in fixed-width but not in variable-width?
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    > With two spaces, the gap after a period is longer than a gap after a comma. As it should be. A period is a full stop, not a continuation.
moron4hire 4y ago
> It doesn't matter what editor you use. Vim, Emacs, TextMate, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Gedit, Notepad++? All of them use monospaced fonts. Unless, like me, you've configured your editor to use a proportional font.
lamontcg 4y ago
Didn't mention ageism at all.
bogdanoff_2 4y ago
I remember someone suggesting putting every sentence on its own line as a writing tool.
CoastalCoder 4y ago
I think we should just compromise and use 1.5-spacing.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  And 0.5 for indices!!!
Stratoscope 4y ago
> Text editors use monospaced fonts! > It doesn't matter what editor you use. Vim, Emacs, TextMate, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Gedit, Notepad++? All of them use monospaced fonts. Most modern editors support proportional fonts. The obvious exceptions are those that run in a terminal, like Vim. In 2012 when the article was written I was using Visual Studio, various JetBrains IDEs, and Araxis Merge, and they all supported proportional fonts at the time. I've been writing all my code in proportional fonts for at least 10-15 years. Other editors that support proportional fonts today include VS Code and the editor in the Meld diff tool.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
at_a_remove 4y ago
I am a two-spacer, largely because I am an Old. However, I do believe it can help with the difference between encountering the period of an abbreviation and one which serves as the end of a sentence. The period here has been operationally overloaded to serve two similar, but not identical, ends. It isn't any kind of quest of mine to convert the world, so I would not characterize it as a losing battle. Perhaps quaint.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
It's a convention and it's easier. I don't really care though. Obviously both work just fine, and that's all I ask. Just don't be a heathen.and.not.space.at.all.
kenshoen 4y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1285/ https://xkcd.com/1285/
jp57 4y ago
I'm baffled by this debate. It seems like a massive bike shed. If you're writing markdown, or html, or latex, the renderer will decide how much space to put after the sentence. You can put one space, or two, or ten or put each sentence on a separate line (great for keeping your text in version control, btw).

35 points by behnamoh 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

I have never agreed with "two space is ugly" because I have always assumed em-space and en-space were being used in typography. It's the closest analogue.

knaik94 4y ago
The issue with that analogy is that even with em and en spaces, the "correct" way of using them is based on where you learned their function. For example, the American use of em vs en dash and the British use is different. The guidelines are based on style rules, they aren't even grammar rules.
- ggm 4y ago
  In effect, style == "is ugly or not ugly" and grammar == "is wrong" and style is highly conditional on education, country of origin, and context. I am british, have used computer typesetting systems since the early 80s, but currently live in Australia which is caught between poles of british-centric and american-centric style guides. Most computer typesetting systems are written by Americans. To the extent they interpret "." as a sentence marker, what they do is therefore by origin of software heavily dominated by what the US marketplace in style expects. Most computer typesetting systems I use are contextually NOT WYSIWYG and involve embedding the markup and processing it through explicit steps. Whilst I believe these are more capable of being told "honour a different style" the style guides tend(ed) to reflect publishing paper journal constraints to space and style, not general writing style. So using T/ROFF with the -ms macros, or LaTeX with specific IEEE journal settings. Microsoft claims to honour locale pretty strongly. I have no idea if this leaks into style beyond s/z spelling and date-time.

remram 4y ago

Why not 3 spaces? > You might also infer from the article's tone that "you get to feel superior to those Neanderthals that use two spaces" I see we're very polite on your side: > don't worry, I'm using two spaces like a sane person

quickthrower2 4y ago
Or a tab! Ducks.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Since you suggest that route, a semantic differentiator between inter-word, inter-element (e.g., "Dr. Gupta", "Sr. Director"), inter-sentence, and inter-paragraph whitespace could be argued for. We already have spaces, tabs, and non-breaking spaces (" " in HTML), for example. ASCII already has a number of field-specific terminators: STX, ETX, EOF, LF, FF, FS, GS, RS, US, etc. Though those tend to be little used. In terms of ease of use, existing standards, and ready interpretation, a doubled space as an inter-sentence indicator has numerous benefits.
School-Cotton 4y ago
> Why not 3 spaces? The main point is that it’s useful for the token that separates words to be different from the one that separates sentences. So three spaces would have no advantage over two.
- remram 4y ago
  That was just one of the many points in the article. It's actually not a point at all unless one uses Vim with the specified setting (which you can only do if all the text you edit uses two spaces).

gardenfelder 4y ago

2012. Dead link to his source: he does have a github.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Two spaces to distinguish between period used in Mr. and period for end of sentence is a compelling reason given in the post. Good for editor navigation. You can split on two spaces to count sentences for example, so code can make sense of it.

sfled 4y ago

My browser doesn't render two spaces in a row unless they're   .

School-Cotton 4y ago
This is a fundamental part of the article’s point.
83457 4y ago
Technically, you only need one of those.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

It's what we learned in keyboarding class, so it is what I do.

GoatOfAplomb 4y ago
Nearly 30 years after keyboarding class, if I tried to change now, I think I'd spend the rest of my life tripping over the keys.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I doubt it. I stopped after about 15 years of double-spacing. The human brain is a lot more malleable than "common sense" would indicate. Single space is as natural to me as double spacing ever was.

daguava 4y ago

I learned two space in keyboard classes but hated every second of it. It made no sense. And to a kid who loves to push authority I always asked "Why am I doing this arbitrary thing no-one can give evidence as to why?" I'm glad two-space died, and I no longer two-space. In my school it was simply used as an authority or power over the children by a typing teacher who was frustrated in a lot of things, but mostly in her marriage. Mrs. Botana - You were the most hated teacher at our school, and you telling us you recognized how hated you were solved nothing. Enjoy your two-space.

mcswell 4y ago
Two space is alive and well. At least it is for me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
LMMojo 4y ago
Just because you didn't understand why did not make her wrong. I'm also sure she was hated for things other than double-spacing.
- daguava 4y ago
  She was hated for aggressively screaming at students and taking out her anger for the life events she professed to us BEFORE our class and teaching period started. Maybe you need to understand that this isn't YOUR experience and I'm accurately talking about a degenerate teaching professional who did their best to be an absolute scumfuck piece of shit.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    That experience ... has nothing to do with two-space sentence termination.

pooper 4y ago

I have a(n even worse) proposal: With markdown especially with version controlled text, start a new line for each new sentence. You can start doing this right now. Don't burden yourself with the thoughts of single space vs double space. Simply add a space after the period and press enter to start a new line after each sentence. Add an empty line to show that you are now in a new paragraph. My rationale is it will help version control software diff your text better. Thoughts?

togaen 4y ago
Yes, this is common practice in many orgs for that reason, as well as that it makes resolving merge conflicts easier.
civilized 4y ago
Poetry.
bee_rider 4y ago
This is the advantage of putting WYSWYG fully in the garbage where it belongs. It also lets you shuffle around sentences when editing which is nice.
geraldcombs 4y ago
This is recommended by the Asciidoctor team[1]. Along with making it easier to split and join paragraphs, it makes it easier to rearrange sentences. [1]https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-recommended-practices/#one-sentence-per-line https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-recommended-practices/...
pronoiac 4y ago
I'd avoid that trailing space. git will complain, a trailing doublespace can cause a linebreak, it's super inconspicuous, and that can trip people up.
samatman 4y ago
Yeah, I hate it. Spent too many years in pine, I will type prose at 78 column width until the day I die. Hopefully before that happens, change management tools will stop being completely moronic about diffing prose. But whether that happens or not: one line per sentence? Not a chance. Unless I'm making a point.

XorNot 4y ago

Just adopt my dad's method: randomly insert some amount of spaces before and after every period in a sentence.

hoosieree 4y ago

Chaotic Neutral doesn't stop at 2 spaces - embeds a non-trivial Whitespace[1] program after every sentence. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...

knaik94 4y ago

Two spacing does not increase legibility of the information. That is the only meaningful metric I care about. If there are studies to show that two-spacing vs single spacing has a meaningful difference in how quickly a human parses or understands information, I will care about changing spacing. The author argues comfort, but because I am so used to single spacing, the two-spaced writing feels awkwardly spaced. I can't easily parse where sentences start and end. The other arguments are pointless. I recognize people still read print, but I can safely say that 90%+ of all of the reading I have done in the past month has been digital. I don't think most people choose vim over a word editor like google docs or microsoft word when writing. The most common ebooks I read are in the epub format, which is based on html. The only pdfs I read are technical papers that are in two column format. There doesn't seem to be a place where two spacing will make a difference. Looking at the page source shows the sentences are two-spaced. But that's not how any of the information is presented. If the author is used to it, there's no reason to change it. I believe that being trained to write the way most people write is more important. It doesn't take much to search+replace two blank spaces with one. Going in the opposite direction is only a little more involved with having to specify a punctuation so you don't end up double spacing every word as well.

mcswell 4y ago
Nor does one spacing increase legibility. I will continue to two space, because I think it looks better (and alas for those tools that ignore what I want because they thing they know better).
- knaik94 4y ago
  I agree that continuing to use whatever you are used to is going to be the most productive.
mdorazio 4y ago
Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29691763/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29691763/ The effect is most pronounced for double spacers like myself, for whom the exact opposite is true of your first argument.
4y ago

dorkwood 4y ago

To me, two-space will often break the flow of the text while reading, because the gap between the period and the next word often exceeds the gap between the current line and the next line down. The gestalt theory of perception explains how we mentally group objects by their proximity. If the next word is closer to the bottom line than it is to the period that came before it, then the hierarchy of connection is broken. I haven't done a study, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it would take slightly more cognitive load to rearrange that hierarchy in your head. I believe this may be why some people perceive two-space as "ugly". It also explains why text with a too-small line height is equally unpleasant.

davidmurdoch 4y ago
I can't read technical matter written with two spaces. My brain inserts a long pause. I can't comprehend it, at least not without intentional extra mental effort. It's really weird and frustrating. I can read my 6 year old's scribble handwriting though. Haha

hkon 4y ago

His answer is that he uses Vim

dredmorbius 4y ago
Vim's sentence-aware navigation is a strong argument, though it's hardly the only text editor which does so, and for which two-spacing affords benefits.

2devnull 4y ago

No mention of tactile or auditory feedback for the writer, which I suspect matters. A space between sentences is read differently, with a slight pause, compared to spaces between words. Writers should write that way too, and double spacing would support that by providing subtle auditory and tactile cues, full stop.

Brian_K_White 4y ago

Whether I 2-space or not, the more important thing is, I would never try to tell you what to do over something so trivial. Whichever way I prefer to write, or read, it doesn't make enough difference as a reader to justify even mentioning it, let alone screeding about it. Anyone writing, complaining, even merely picking a side out loud and trying to defend one side in forums like this, are all automatically wrong because of that, regardless which side, regardless what their arguments are. The far worse crime than being in the wrong about double spacing, is feeling that you even have any valid place trying to dictate something like that to anyone else. It's not like the Oxford Comma. ;)

knaik94 4y ago
I don't agree with the tone of the original article but I do think we should discuss our preferences. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion on it. There's a difference between opinionated suggestions and arrogant mandates. This forum does a good job avoiding arrogant mandates.
pestatije 4y ago
Right, tabs vs spaces anyone? Indentation or braces? Bring it to the max and you'll see people ready to kill for a line in a map.
KolenCh 4y ago
I really hate this kind of "I don't care" logic floating among hackers or even just scientists. If I'm to argue, I'd start by pointing out the amount of space is not an integer. So arguing 1 or 2 is already wrong. Kerning of the font take cares about the spacing you have there. So the advice of using 1 space is really that it is understood that you have a single space after period, and the designer take that expectation into the kerning decision. The bottom line to me is that if you can't publish a book via a "traditional" publisher using that typographical decision then it is very likely to be wrong. Argue all you want about why you don't care about that. But for many people that reflects on the care/effort you put into your work, and likely I shouldn't care about work like this. The other thing I hate much is the trivialization, which is related to the "I don't care" culture. From my experience, many things are trivial at first glance. But it is likely wrong. Most things are very complicated with a lot of subtleties involved. Seeing them as trivial is often a sign that they really don't understand the subject very well.

defanor 4y ago

I learned about two-spacing only in my 20s, initially thinking that it's interesting but not very useful. Now it just looks like a cute topic to argue about and to have a strong opinion on, or to speculate about conspiring two-spacers, while being generally harmless. Unlike tabs or inferior text editors. As if all the important issues are solved, tabs are eradicated, and it's left to argue about the number of spaces.

kotlin2 4y ago

You’d need to look at the source to notice the double spaces… because HTML collapses white space

Slackwise 4y ago

Two-spacing is from the era of typewriters. Typerwriters had monospaced typefaces because of how they operated. One space didn't work well enough if the period is rendered center of the type block. To work visually for prose, you'd have had to shift it leftwards so it hugs up against the end of a sentence, leaving a wider gap afterwards. But then you'd end up with awkward decimal points for numbers.... so instead we decided to just use two spaces instead. So, it's obviously fine to two-space if you're using a typewriter. It's therefor also fine if you're writing in a monospace/fixed-width font. But don't do it with proportional width fonts! They are designed with various hints in place to render appropriately as one should typeset them, adjusting spacing between various letters, and of course rendering periods and decimal points correctly, contextually! HTML will also ignore extra spaces, accordingly. Word processors will either highlight consecutive spaces as a typo or even auto-correct as you type. So I guess not much worry here if it's a habit.

lisper 4y ago
I beg to differ. Computers should serve humans, not the other way around. Humans should not be burdened with the cognitive load of having to worry about different rules for typing depending on what font they are using. Besides, the same text can be rendered in different fonts at different times. The Right Answer here is for the software that renders text to do the Right Thing no matter how many spaces the user types after a period. HTML already does this so there is an existence proof that this is possible.
cakoose 4y ago
> It's therefor also fine if you're writing in a monospace/fixed-width font. This is the standard explanation I see everywhere, but I don't get it. With two spaces, the gap after a period is longer than a gap after a comma. Why is that "obviously fine" in fixed-width but not in variable-width?
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > With two spaces, the gap after a period is longer than a gap after a comma. As it should be. A period is a full stop, not a continuation.

moron4hire 4y ago

> It doesn't matter what editor you use. Vim, Emacs, TextMate, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Gedit, Notepad++? All of them use monospaced fonts. Unless, like me, you've configured your editor to use a proportional font.

lamontcg 4y ago

Didn't mention ageism at all.

bogdanoff_2 4y ago

I remember someone suggesting putting every sentence on its own line as a writing tool.

CoastalCoder 4y ago

I think we should just compromise and use 1.5-spacing.

dredmorbius 4y ago
And 0.5 for indices!!!

Stratoscope 4y ago

> Text editors use monospaced fonts! > It doesn't matter what editor you use. Vim, Emacs, TextMate, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Gedit, Notepad++? All of them use monospaced fonts. Most modern editors support proportional fonts. The obvious exceptions are those that run in a terminal, like Vim. In 2012 when the article was written I was using Visual Studio, various JetBrains IDEs, and Araxis Merge, and they all supported proportional fonts at the time. I've been writing all my code in proportional fonts for at least 10-15 years. Other editors that support proportional fonts today include VS Code and the editor in the Meld diff tool.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

at_a_remove 4y ago

I am a two-spacer, largely because I am an Old. However, I do believe it can help with the difference between encountering the period of an abbreviation and one which serves as the end of a sentence. The period here has been operationally overloaded to serve two similar, but not identical, ends. It isn't any kind of quest of mine to convert the world, so I would not characterize it as a losing battle. Perhaps quaint.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

It's a convention and it's easier. I don't really care though. Obviously both work just fine, and that's all I ask. Just don't be a heathen.and.not.space.at.all.

kenshoen 4y ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1285/ https://xkcd.com/1285/

jp57 4y ago

I'm baffled by this debate. It seems like a massive bike shed. If you're writing markdown, or html, or latex, the renderer will decide how much space to put after the sentence. You can put one space, or two, or ten or put each sentence on a separate line (great for keeping your text in version control, btw).