I will confess to being a two-spacer, for exactly the reason described. I learned to type on a typewriter without proportional spacing. It’s a hard habit to break, particularly since I haven’t had much reason to try (HTML ignores the extra space when displaying).
6 thoughts on “One Or Two Spaces After A Period”
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Always been a two-spacer, by training and intent. I edit myself quite a lot and I find it much easier to find sentences this way. Typographers want to say I am wrong, fine, but I only physically print a tiny fraction of anything I write, so I don’t see where they get a say.
Probably should read this before accepting the slate writer’s view of the history of one/two space after a period in typography:
http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324
The problem is not the typist putting two spaces at the end of a sentence (or colon – at least that’s what I learned in typing class). The problem is dumbshit SW like MS Word and its ilk (WordPerfect did it too) that lets this happen. Don Knuth’s typesetting system TeX, which I learned in the mid-80s, does it right: ignore the spacing in the marked-up text file (except for word and control command boundaries), and substitute the correct typesetting.
MS Word is such a pile of crap for doing professionally formatted documents, especially after using industrial-strength systems like TeX and Interleaf…maybe Adobe InDesign can do it but I don’t have experience with it.
Always a 2-spacer. I like the sentence separation for the eyes. Makes discerning sentences easier.
I was a type expert at Adobe back in the ’90’s. One of our quality parameters was a thing called “global coloring”, which abstracted the overall gray density and also the “speckeledness”, at various scales (think fractals), of a page of text. While working on this I concluded that most “Roman” fonts yielded best results with slightly less than two x-widths, or about 1.5 m-widths, after a period in a sentence, as part of a page. (A sentence written in a latin-derived language – of course the language affects this question. German, for instance, is distinctly different.)
As it happens, there were typewriters in the 80’s that could do this, that is, the spacebar character width was variable between inter-word spacing and inter-sentence spacing.
I also think that saying there is, or even can be, a general formal rule on this topic is simply wrong.
It’s difficult for me to reconcile the two opinions of professional type setters that (a) extra space after a period is ugly and interferes with reading AND (b) a right-justified margin, created by inserting extra space between words in the flowing text, is beautiful and easier to read.
Seems to me that one or the other of these assessments must be mistaken.