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“Some” O’Reilly books aside, any professionally designed book published for the last hundred years on the shelves of anyone reading this, as well as every magaz

“Some” O’Reilly books aside, any professionally designed book published for the last hundred years on the shelves of anyone reading this, as well as every magazine and newspaper, uses single-spaced sentences. That HTML collapses multiple spaces is a feature, not a bug. It means you can, if you want, double-space sentences while authoring/editing your source files and the result will still come out “correct” (according to settled practice).

vintagedave 3y ago
> any professionally designed book published for the last hundred years on the shelves of anyone reading this With respect, that's an incorrect assertion. I have books on my shelf published up through the eighties with wider spacing between sentences. A more accurate comment might be that in the modern design era, and I'd guess this is approximately post-WW2 onwards, sentence spacing became less common and it is now common or standard not to. That clarification is true. How do I know? I like wider sentence spacing (see my comment above on this thread) and have kept an eye out for it in books when I buy them. I suspect it was computers that killed wide sentence spacing: the web, as seen in the linked discussion thread, combined with word processors that weren't as capable as TeX and didn't support it. Here we are thirty years later and it's become the absolute norm, so much we can barely imagine an alternative. But I regret that technical decisions and limitations have left us in this position.
- velcrovan 3y ago
  Can you give me some titles?
  - vintagedave 3y ago
    I’d love to, but most of my books are in storage. The two I bought recently as examples of typography are an old copy of H G Well’s Veronica, which does display sentence spacing but is too old to use as an example for you, and an ancient book in Estonian printed in German-style fraktur. If it helps I do think the eighties one, and I wish I could remember what it was, was indeed an outlier. I’d actually love to track down the O’Reilly’s books mentioned in the linked thread.
weinzierl 3y ago
In addition to that it only ever has been an English typographic tradition. The option to turn it off in LaTeX is called \frenchspacing for a reason. It could be \worldspacing as well.

vintagedave 3y ago

> any professionally designed book published for the last hundred years on the shelves of anyone reading this With respect, that's an incorrect assertion. I have books on my shelf published up through the eighties with wider spacing between sentences. A more accurate comment might be that in the modern design era, and I'd guess this is approximately post-WW2 onwards, sentence spacing became less common and it is now common or standard not to. That clarification is true. How do I know? I like wider sentence spacing (see my comment above on this thread) and have kept an eye out for it in books when I buy them. I suspect it was computers that killed wide sentence spacing: the web, as seen in the linked discussion thread, combined with word processors that weren't as capable as TeX and didn't support it. Here we are thirty years later and it's become the absolute norm, so much we can barely imagine an alternative. But I regret that technical decisions and limitations have left us in this position.

velcrovan 3y ago
Can you give me some titles?
- vintagedave 3y ago
  I’d love to, but most of my books are in storage. The two I bought recently as examples of typography are an old copy of H G Well’s Veronica, which does display sentence spacing but is too old to use as an example for you, and an ancient book in Estonian printed in German-style fraktur. If it helps I do think the eighties one, and I wish I could remember what it was, was indeed an outlier. I’d actually love to track down the O’Reilly’s books mentioned in the linked thread.

weinzierl 3y ago

In addition to that it only ever has been an English typographic tradition. The option to turn it off in LaTeX is called \frenchspacing for a reason. It could be \worldspacing as well.