14 ms·
Space After Periods (1993)
- Groxx 3y agoHere's your annual reminder that anyone that says X decision is wrong is wrong, and has been for something like 150+ years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing There has never been consistency here. Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want. And don't consider web tech to be a typographical decision, it's just the only technically feasible option if you want to make something whitespace-amount-agnostic so people can indent their html.
- robnado 3y agoI used to put two spaces after sentences because people told me it is the correct thing to do. Now I put one space after a sentence because different people told me it is the correct thing to do. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
- mannykannot 3y agoBravo! I like your subtle sense of humor - i.e. not so subtle that it goes right over my head, but barely.
- distcs 3y agoThe humor flew right over my head. Care to explain?
- distcs 3y agoI'm beginning to doubt if there was any humor there in the first place. > When in Rome, do as the Romans do. I mean if it had been a French city I could say that a pun about French Spacing is there in the joke. But Rome isn't a French city. So still very confused if and what the joke is. French Spacing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sentence_spacing#French_and_English_spacing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sentence_spacing#Fr...
- mannykannot 3y agoMy apology for a slow response, but I took the phrase 'when in Rome...' to be a reference to the scripto continua style seen on Roman monuments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
- distcs 3y agothanks for the reply!
- skipkey 3y agoFor years, I kept my wifi with the passphrase “This is my passphrase. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Without the quotes of course. With two spaces after the period. At this point I am not going to overcome forty years of muscle memory. I assume whatever tool is doing the rendering will make things right according to the current convention.
- kbutler 3y agoHopefully two spaces after /each/ period!
- kortex 3y ago> When in Rome, do as the Romans do IOVMEANISOVLDRITELIKEDIS?
- sjoerger 3y ago“Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want.” I believe this is why I see an increasing lack of punctuation or capitalization in online discourse.
- ultrarunner 3y agoI’m told it’s because the period is considered passive-aggressive. I assume it’s too formal final; maybe The Kids These Days hold out hope that a sentence might not really be over? At any rate whoever got the McDonald’s account embraces it wholeheartedly.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoOnly when sending a one-sentence text, where the beginning and end of the sentence are clearly the bounds of the text itself. You see periods still between sentences of multi-sentence texts. Sometimes other markers are used like ellipsis or emoji. I really genuinely like this change for orthography. The feel & sound of spoken language is highly sensitive to the context and formality: you talk differently giving a speech than you do at dinner with your family etc. It's cool that we're adapting the written forms to more completely express the full range of formality that we actually produce written language in now. The details of orthography are all just convention and tradition anyway. As much as it pains prescriptivists and peaked-in-high-school wellactually pedants the true language is the spoken and writing is merely a tool we use to represent it. These additions make writing a more complete & capable representation. And from a more CS view it's cool too. We've hijacked sometimes-redundant punctuation to convey nuances of tone and intent. Essentially increasing the "bandwidth" of writing.
- asplake 3y agoSimilarly for bullet points – no full stop required.
- marcosdumay 3y agoYou would be surprised by how often people ignore those on their verbal discourse.
- Narishma 3y ago> Vote with your fingers, space stuff however you want. I prefer tabs to spaces myself.
- kstrauser 3y agoOff the island with ya.
- kmoser 3y agoYes, but do your tabs indent by two, four or eight spaces?
- kmstout 3y agoFibonacci tab stops! - https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3m6yhd/fibonacci_indentation/ https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3m6yhd/fibonacci_ind... - https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/171031/indent-your-code-according-to-fibonacci https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/171031/indent-y...
- patrickmay 3y agoMy tabs insert spaces.
- Izkata 3y agoI once jokingly suggested a compromise of 3 spaces, then got curious. Turns out I like it more than 2 or 4, and now use it for all my personal stuff.
- JohnFen 3y agoI've seen house programming styles that mandate a tab is 3 spaces, as well as 5. Personally, I have no dog in this fight at all. I'll follow whatever the house style is.
- groovy2shoes 3y agoJust enough spaces to reach the next tab stop.
- jononomo 3y ago[flagged]
- earthboundkid 3y agoLook very closely at these: One. One. Two. Two.
- jononomo 3y agoThey both have one space. This forum eliminates double spaces after periods that end a sentence, thereby degrading readability.
- lolinder 3y agoIt's not this forum, it's the default behavior of HTML unless you specifically opt in to significant white space, which few sites do because it has a tendency to create spurious newlines unless the code is maintained very carefully. I'd be very curious to know if you have any examples of a website that does preserve multiple spaces after periods—I would suspect that in most cases where you think that is happening, it's actually because the font handles the extra space. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space
- jononomo 3y agoOkay, so apparently, HTML has chosen to degrade readability, which is a bummer.
- earthboundkid 3y agoWhether it's a bummer or not, the point is this is how every website has worked for the last 30 years. I find that if you look closely at old books, the spacing is pretty variable. I have one book by my desk from 1895 and the spacing after a period is more like 2½ normal spaces, but I have another book from 1978 and the spacing after period is basically identical to the spacing after a word. There's not much consistency from book to book.
- quotemstr 3y agoI usually use two spaces after the end of a sentence because doing so helps my text editor distinguish sentence boundaries from abbreviations.
- taeric 3y agoI thought I was specifically taught that this is why you do two spaces. It isn't that you need two spaces after a sentence, per se; but the system has an easier time knowing to do inter sentence spacing instead of title if you do that. That is, Dr. Smith should have less spacing. I'm guessing there are so few things that that applies to, that most systems that care can just hardcode it nowadays? Further, I thought any typesetting system would play with the spaces after words to make things pleasant. That is, a space isn't a set width in any typeset thing. That really only became a thing with typewriters.
- thristian 3y agoThe other day I discovered a font called Elstob that has an "Old-style punctuation spacing" mode that (among other things) adds significantly more space between sentences: https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/ https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/ The documentation for that feature says[1]: When Spacing is set to 1, the spacing between words and sentences and around punctuation marks is a good match for most books printed in the late eighteenth century. [1]: https://github.com/psb1558/Elstob-font/blob/c9af23d3cbadf111290106bcd3ff089a077c1f3e/docs/ElstobManual.tex#L410-L416 https://github.com/psb1558/Elstob-font/blob/c9af23d3cbadf111...
- Nifty3929 3y agoI would like to see a greater tolerance for different preferences. I like one space, but totally fine for some people to use two spaces. It’s not their problem if I stab my eyes out with a pencil when I see two spaces.
- throwawaymaths 3y agoImagine having not just two spaces but a whole damn line to emphasize the pauses in text: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#/media/File%3AUnited_States_Declaration_of_Independence.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of... If two spaces causes you to stab your eyes for this I demand no less than seppuku
- GavinMcG 3y agoThat seems like an unfortunate tool to have discarded. Right now, I can use vertical separation to structure text, but horizontal separation.... Well, that's far more limited. Within sentences, there's the dash—either em or space-en-space, depending on where you're from—and there are plenty of other structural options. Between sentences, you've got the ellipsis, and that's it. The way they're used in the Declaration, in place of paragraph breaks, is helpful even when you're not just trying to save space—for example, to structure a list of short words or phrases without creating the visual separation from the text that comes with using separate lines.
- ChristianGeek 3y agoAn ellipsis should never be used between sentences; you should be using a semi-colon.
- GavinMcG 3y agoNo, that’s the whole point I’m making. A semicolon is no better than terminal punctuation in creating visual horizontal space, which is a tool for communicating semantic structure, but one that we never use. I am not speaking to what is grammatically proper, but rather to what is possible outside of current accepted usage.
- zrail 3y ago[flagged]
- Rhapso 3y agoAs an engineer with fermi estimation in mind: Is 10 guaranteed to solve all problems? 99% confidence it will? How much does it cost in weight budget to add some 9s to that? Oh wow tampons are light. 100 it is then.
- fknorangesite 3y agoGood first estimate! The next step is introspection: > Why don't I know the answer to this already, even within an order of magnitude?
- Rhapso 3y agoEverybody around me who would find utility with them has non-normal usage patterns (birth control, PCOS, hysterectomy) so there is a pretty high variance in my observations (across individuals and time) and I don't need to actively seek more samples. I just make sure there is a box of tampons around and borrow one to use for wound care when I need one and replace the empty box when requested.
- EarthLaunch 3y agoEdit: -
- nostrebored 3y agoin many contexts punctuation is as unnecessary as an extra space between sentences
- nomel 3y agoiwouldclaimthatspacesandpunctuationareneverneededandcomprehensionismoreaproblemofpracticeratherthanability
- lolinder 3y agoThis is a continuation of a discussion on a different page about spaces and tabs in HTML documents [0]. It's actually a much more interesting discussion than this title and the tail end of this conversation would indicate, hinging on a disagreement over whether white space has semantic meaning or is purely presentational. Terry Allen from O'Reilly argues that white space is significant to the meaning of the text and therefore needs first-class support in HTML, even outside of PRE. Others emphatically consider white space to be a formatting issue that has no place in HTML, which they feel should be entirely presentation-agnostic. Interestingly, a couple of times people mention the possibility of building in support for TeX and other markup languages to fill the need for precisely-formatted documents. Specifying the presentation of HTML in a separate file (what we know as CSS) doesn't appear to be on anyone's radar yet. I wonder what the web would look like today if that had been the route we took. [0] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/index.html#468 http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/index.h...
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoI actually added a DVI (TeX) renderer to Mosaic in 1993 (while working at US CS&E). NCSA/Marc wasn't interested in the patch. If the server said the document was MIME typed <the correct type for DVI>, the regular page renderer was bypassed and code that I ripped from ... not sure where ... drew into the browser instead.
- lisper 3y agoHowcananyonearguethatwhitespacehasnosemanticsignificance?
- Zamiel_Snawley 3y agoFunnily enough, I can still understand your message without white space, it is just harder to parse. Doesn't that undercut your statement?
- lisper 3y agoBeing harder to parse is not a trivial detail, it's the whole ballgame. Written language has a lot of redundancy. That's one of the things that makes it work. The redundancy makes it an error-correcting code so that the information doesn't get dstryed by miner errers. That is what allows you to glean the meaning of a message even without whitespace. Y cn d th sm trck by lmntng vwls (u o eiiai ooa). Just because you don't completely destroy the message by eliminating whitespace doesn't mean that the whitespace wasn't semantically significant. [UPDATE] Whitespace is actually a pretty modern innovation, and it is not universal. In old manuscripts the text is often allframmedtogetherlikethis. Also, even in modern German it is common to compose verylongcompoundwords.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mproud 3y agoNo big deal, just some random Marc Andreeson and Tim Berners-Lee comments…
- kmoser 3y agoPlus some rando named Guido van Rossum.
- aj7 3y agoTwitter killed two spaces.
- DanielKehoe 3y agoI'm Daniel Kehoe, and I participated in the brief www-talk "Space after Periods" discussion thirty years ago (as Daniel Miles Kehoe). I wrote a blog post three years ago, "Personal History: Punctuating the Web (1993)," that offers more context and perspective on the discussion [0]. We discussed this on Hacker News three years ago when Microsoft Word began flagging double spaces after a period as errors [1]. That brief discussion thirty years ago still seems to arouse strong feelings for people. Today, looking back, I'm mostly amused that Guido van Rossum (the developer of the Python programming language) wanted web browsers to collapse multiple spaces to a single space after periods. Python, notably among programming languages, treats whitespace as significant. [0] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-the-web-1993/ https://danielkehoe.com/posts/personal-history-punctuating-t... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22975299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22975299
- fsckboy 3y agoI heard about this issue back in the 80's talking to a friend doing an early WYSIWYG word processor development project. Typeset, proportional spaced, yes, same spacing between sentences and words, and if you eyeball typeset books from the precomputer era, that's what you will see. I also looked it up in Chicago Manual of Style, and one thing I remember is, you want to get your hands on an earlier edition (for geek fun) because they have much more detail about typesetting than they do in later editions. (I don't know what the edition sweetspot is but I found a 1930's copy and I liked it) >mostly amused that Guido van Rossum...wanted web browsers to collapse multiple spaces to a single space...Python...treats whitespace as significant. this is actually pretty funny, thank you
- GoofballJones 3y agoI learned to type on typewriters in the late 70s. I was thrown in a typing class in high-school and I thought to myself "this is a useless class, I'm NEVER going to ever need this". Turns out it was one of the best things I learned in high-school. Anyway, I never used double spaces after periods. My typing teacher would always give me grief for it, but for whatever reason, I just never did it. As you can see, I still don't.
- perilunar 3y agoSpaces are significant, but now we have unicode, we can stop thinking about the number of spaces and start using the correct unicode character for the type of space we want. Unicode has at least 16 different types of space character. As an experiment, here is some text with differing spaces. I wonder if HN can handle it: En space between sentences: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent eu ullamcorper mi, id dictum nibh. Pellentesque fermentum efficitur viverra. Ut tincidunt ut nunc non viverra. Nunc accumsan ultrices libero ut efficitur. Vestibulum a eros a urna vestibulum tempor. Ut vel sodales tellus. Aliquam enim velit, varius eget mi ut, blandit dictum nulla. Quisque non malesuada felis. Duis sit amet sapien at risus efficitur fermentum. Aenean posuere tempus elit, nec eleifend tellus bibendum a. Suspendisse potenti. Em space between sentences: Pellentesque semper sed enim a rutrum. Suspendisse iaculis laoreet leo, a tristique lorem tincidunt id. Ut lacinia, sem a sodales fermentum, leo diam elementum elit, vitae egestas risus velit non magna. Curabitur nec ligula quis sem imperdiet rhoncus sit amet a lorem. Donec ut risus sapien. Aenean et nisl quam. Aenean nec interdum metus, quis vulputate enim. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Nunc pulvinar molestie imperdiet. Etiam non nisi id leo blandit placerat vel ac ligula. Duis in urna quis erat dignissim pellentesque hendrerit sed sapien. Pellentesque tempor magna eu lacus laoreet tempor. Fusce nec tortor sed urna placerat bibendum eu id mi. [edit: no, it can't. They work in plain HTML, so I guess the HN form is converting them to plain spaces.] [edit, the second: try html entities [removed] — doesn't work either.]
- santix 3y agohttps://docs.w3cub.com/latex/_005cfrenchspacing.html https://docs.w3cub.com/latex/_005cfrenchspacing.html
- mantella 3y agoUntil today, I never put it together that Guido van Rossum (python) and Just van Rossum (LettError) were related, though it makes total sense in retrospect. mind blown
- butlersean 3y agodespite what many pedants will have you believe, unlike many other languages there is no central authority of how english should be spoken or written. there isnt even a correct spelling of words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
- Axien 3y agoGen-X here. I was always a big fan of two spaces - because that is the way I was taught. One day, a millennial woman in the office commented an email was from an old person. I asked how she knew. She said two spaces after a period. That point forward I was a one space person.
- patrickmay 3y agoYou'll have to pry that second space from my cold, dead muscle memory.
- jacobsenscott 3y agoIt's already been done. Almost all email content read through web browsers these days, which do exactly that.
- naikrovek 3y agono, nor do IM clients in Electron, in my experience. not Teams, anyway. spaces are preserved.
- naikrovek 3y agosame. I don't care if it labels me as old. I am old.
- JohnFen 3y ago> That point forward I was a one space person. You shouldn't fold so easily. She gave you a compliment, anyway.
- mturmon 3y agopls also refrain from initial caps and message-terminating periods
- mprovost 3y agoApparently (according to TikTok) ending a sentence with an ellipsis is also a Gen-X thing...
- someweirdperson 3y agoDo whatever you want, but DO NOT put space before punctuation marks. With the exception of space before smileys that are substituting punctuation.
- JohnFen 3y agoAnd don't use smileys as substitutes for punctuation.
- aunetx 3y agoIt's funny because in French, you are meant to put a space between punctuation marks if and only if they contain two elements. So you put a space before :, ;, «, !, ? etc but not before ., ,, ..., etc And I find it wonderful!
- ianburrell 3y agoOne thing that doesn't get brought up is that there is a difference between typewriter and word processor. One space works best in proportional fonts with typeset work. Two spaces work best in monospace fonts like text editor. The reason is that in typeset, the space after periods is wider than space between words, while in monospace need to put extra space to distinguish sentences. I think that some of the conflict comes from when and where people learned the rule. Before computers, people used typewriters and were taught to use two spaces after period. Typesetters knew to use the right space. Early computers were mostly monospace. Word processors introduced variable fonts and were smart enough to collapse two spaces. Email and text editors were monospace. The web made everything proportional and collapsed two spaces to one hiding any difference in source. One space has won enough that people use one space in monospace text.
- joegahona 3y agoThis is covered in the "The PC Is Not a Typewriter"[1], by Robin Williams. (No, not that Robin Williams.) I adjusted from two spaces to one back in 1999 or so, when I read this book, and the adjustment wasn't as painful as I thought it'd be. I learned on a typewriter in the late '80s. For some reason, Stephen King uses two spaces between each word in his Tweets.[2] Not sure if this is some statement he's making or a technical glitch. [1] https://www.amazon.com/PC-Not-Typewriter-Creating-Professional-Level/dp/0938151495 https://www.amazon.com/PC-Not-Typewriter-Creating-Profession... [2] https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1678579628686946304?s=20 https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1678579628686946304?s...
- distcs 3y ago> I adjusted from two spaces to one back in 1999 or so, when I read this book, and the adjustment wasn't as painful as I thought it'd be. Did you switch from two spaces to one space while writing in a text editor using monospace font too?
- joegahona 3y ago> Did you switch from two spaces to one space while writing in a text editor using monospace font too? Yes, I switched to one space no matter what, but my use of monospaced fonts was rare back then. Even today I use only one space after periods, even when using monospace fonts. HN is an interesting case: The input field in comments is (I think?) monospace, but the output of posts is Verdana, which is not monospace.
- davidmurphy 3y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-2nd/dp/0201782634 https://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-2nd/dp/0201782634
- staplung 3y agoI used to be firmly in the one-space camp because my first intro to the subject was from Robin Williams _The Mac Is Not A Typewriter_. However, at some point -probably one of the regular resurrections of this debate on HN - I came across a convincing argument that the line of reasoning in that book is wrong; that it was actually common for typeset books to use larger spaces between sentences than between words and that when the typewriter was invented, the two space rule came about because that's what people were already used to seeing. I got so sick of all the arguments from ignorance that I decided to get empirical and have taken to examining the type in old books to see if there's any kind of consistency as you work back in time from the word-processor era to the typewriter era to the pre-typewriter-era. The problem is that I don't have access to enough old books to come to much of a conclusion. I have _The Works of Shakespeare_ from 1919 (MacMillan and Co.) and it definitely uses wider spaces between sentences than between words. This is true both in the fully justified text of the preface as well as in the ragged right of the plays. I also have a Webster's Dictionary from 1937 and it too uses wider spaces between sentences than between words. All the text is fully justified. However, virtually all modern books use the same width space between words as between sentences. Notice that I'm _not_ saying "one space" or "two spaces" because books are typically fully-justified and so it can easily be the case that all the spaces on a line are much wider than a single space character; it's just that the space between sentences is no wider than the space between words. Which brings me to what I feel like is usually ignored in these debates: justification. Professionally typeset works that get printed are almost universally fully justified. Everything else - typical word-processor output, the entirety of the web, etc. is left justified. if you're going to write an algorithm for full-justification you're going to have to mess with spacing and it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to put a little more space between sentences than between words. Although presumably it's algorithmically simpler to treat all spaces the same way, especially if there aren't great rules for even knowing when a sentence ends e.g. "No, I expect you to die Mr. Bond".
- distcs 3y ago> I used to be firmly in the one-space camp because my first intro to the subject was from Robin Williams _The Mac Is Not A Typewriter_. So which camp are you in now? I did a 'view source' on your comment. I see you still type with a single space after period. So are you still in the one-space camp? Can you share a little bit more about which camp you are in and why?
- yellowapple 3y ago> But seriously, how is a text widget supposed to know where a sentence ends and where it doesn't? By scanning for terminating punctuation followed by either two spaces or a newline. What's that? You don't use double-spaces between each sentence? Sucks to be you! The Man™ can pry my double-spaces from my cold dead fingers. And I say terminating punctuation in general (not just periods) because there's a growing number of cases of other such punctuation occurring within certain proper nouns - for example, "Panic! at the Disco".
- jhoechtl 3y agoCurrently discussed in https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/14wn2ld/i_am_going_with_setq_sentenceenddoublespace_t/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/14wn2ld/i_am_going_w...
- dredmorbius 3y agoYOVKIDSTHESEDAYSHAVEITSOEASY|ISAYBRINGBACKSCRIPTIOCONTINVAANDMAGISCULETEXT|LETTHEBODIESFALLVVWERETHEYMAY. (Two-spacer 4evvah)
- crabbone 3y agoI will write two spaces as long as Emacs has by-sentence navigation. I wouldn't care what anyone thinks about it. I studied printing and typography in particular, as a student. I worked in printing and publishing, mostly in a large newspaper before I pivoted to programming. I haven't done any work in that area since the time Adobe Pagemaker overtook QuarkXPress (around the time of G5 and MacOS X). But, I think the principles are still valid to this day as nothing really changed in the printed text. So, when paginating a newspaper, the goal is to achieve a "pleasant look". This includes a bunch of rules that... sort of have some justification sometimes, and less so other times... well, here are some examples: * Don't allow for four consecutive lines to end with hyphens because it breaks the visual image of the body of text as a rectangle (or whatever other shape that the text was intended to flow in). Obviously, four here is a heuristic, and in reality will depend on the space between lines, the size of the font etc. But, the rule says "four". * Similarly, don't allow for four consecutive lines to have spaces between words align vertically because it creates an artifact in the otherwise uniform rectangle filled by text. * Don't allow for a single line from the previous paragraph to start a page / a column because readers want a paragraph to be close together as it's supposed to convey a single thought. And there are many, many more, including the size of dashes that should be used in specifying year or time spans, used in math formulas as minus, used in direct speech, used as way to separate sub-sentences and so on. Unfortunately, these also vary by language and country. Sometimes even the prose vs verse will affect the preferred length of dashes. So, when it comes to periods, they can happen in acronyms, in initials or to signal the end of the sentence. When they are used in acronyms or, and especially in initials / titles, it's very desirable to keep the word following the period with the space on the same line with whatever preceded the period. I.e. "V. I. Lenin" should be treated as a single word, from typographical perspective. In practice, in typography, there are "unbreakable" symbols, mostly dashes and spaces, and these would be used for titles and initials to prevent accidental linebreak from cutting through someone's name. In contrast to this, it's highly desirable that the linebreak occurs where the sentence ends. Since keyboards offer limited input capabilities when it comes to text formatting, and in order to help editors to present text in a more easily digestible way, it seems like putting two spaces after a period, if it's meant to terminate a sentence is a small price to pay. My typical way of working with prose in Emacs is that I repeatedly ask it to re-flow the paragraph (because of the edits I make to it). So, on top of being able to skip number of whole sentences in any direction, I would also prefer that the editor doesn't break initials off the name, while try to break lines on sentence end. Most computer users today use crippled text editors s.a. VSCode or MS Word, which don't offer similar functionality, and so to their users double space after period would appear as a meaningless chore. I understand that the needs of the majority is where it will end in the end of the day, but, personally, will never accept this kind of approach.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoSince the majority of the text I produce these days is rendered as markdown before being shown to a reader, I've taken to putting newlines after periods. It makes prose much easier to edit with a linewise-thinking code editor, and the reader doesn't notice. After developing this habit, I now personally find it also easier to skim text with the newlines shown because I know that the beginning of the line is also the beginning of the sentence.
- nick-of-time 3y agoSame for me, I write either markdown or latex and both have this behavior. In latex it's outright recommended, for ease of commenting out or moving sentences.
- JohnFen 3y agoI learned something interesting about myself here... I was always in the "two spaces after the period" camp, because that's how I was taught as a young sprout. So I assumed that's how I still write. I've been writing and publishing fiction and nonfiction for decades and took a quick tour through my work. My early work does indeed have two spaces after each period. But, at some point, I started to shift. I went through a couple of years where I was inconsistent about using two spaces or one, and after that, all of my writing uses one space exclusively. I didn't even notice that change in my own writing. It boggled my brain a little bit.
- watersb 3y agoAm I the only one who thought this was about low-orbit adventure following menstruation? Because seriously I did. Thankfully, by the 1990s NASA had a bit more experience with female astronauts. A popular story of NASA’s initial accommodation is entertaining and seemed like legit fodder for HN thread: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/03/1102635355/marcia-belsky-that-time-when-nasa-almost-sent-sally-ride-to-space-with-100-tampo https://www.npr.org/2022/06/03/1102635355/marcia-belsky-that... https://www.poynter.org/tfcn/2021/did-nasa-send-a-woman-to-space-with-100-tampons/ https://www.poynter.org/tfcn/2021/did-nasa-send-a-woman-to-s...
- glonq 3y agoTwo semesters of touch-typing in the 1980's has cemented two-spaces into my muscle memory. I can't shake it; it looks/feels wrong to use one space even though I respect the efficiency and aesthetics of that.
- robomartin 3y agoThis is is interesting. When I learned to type, I also learned to use two spaces after a sentence. The habit stuck. I don’t think about it at all, it just happens. And, yes, paragraphs sometimes look weird to me if sentences are not separated by two spaces.