A little extra space after a period in a sentence does help legibility, especially in print. However, I completely agree it does not make sense to manually intr

A little extra space after a period in a sentence does help legibility, especially in print. However, I completely agree it does not make sense to manually introduce two spaces in manuscripts, and I hope two-space typists stop doing it. 1. Two full spaces, especially with monospaced fonts, is entirely too much, and hurts legibility. When I say "a little extra space," I really do mean "a little." 2. It is the job of the typesetting or layout system or engine to properly render sentences. A typist should focus on writing, on expressing thoughts as well and as clearly as possible, not on dealing with layout or font kerning bullshit. For example, TeX, a layout engine which produces very good-looking results, adds a little extra space after a period (full stop) TeX just cares about whitespace, but does not count how many occurred (an exception: one or more blank lines introduce a new paragraph). It understands the page being laid out, and it understands the font, so it just adds the appropriate amount of space where needed, without any extra effort from the typist. TeX also happens to correctly handle inter-line hyphenation, which typists have no business worrying about, either. The same applies for first-sentence-in-paragraph indentation. Honestly, if a layout "engine" is called MS Word, or some other WYSLLTS (What You See Looks Like Total Shit) fancy word processor, and does not appropriately lay out documents, then that "engine" is a piece of junk. Failing that, type however many spaces you want and hire an InDesign or Quark Express expert to make sure everything looks as it should.