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Comment by redwall_hp | Hacker News Reader

Good. The only reason that habit is a thing is because of typewriters, which are monospaced. Some people just cargo culted the practice long past its expiration date...which makes for awkward spacing.

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Even on typewriters double spaces has been an English thing. In German it has never existed. And I have never noticed that it would have been difficult in reading typewritten German text because one wouldn't see where the sentences end. But then some English speakers might joke that in German you note the end of the sentence by finally hitting the last verb.

French punctuation looks weird to me, because they do require a space before and after every punctuation mark that consists of two parts (question mark, exclamation mark, French double quotes (guillemets) etc). Haven't heard that they would have ever required 2 spaces in a row, though. No idea about Spanish and other big languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:German_text_example_-_Em_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Example_of_french-spaced_...

Quoting from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sentence_spacing

> French typists used a single space between sentences, consistent with the typeset French spacing technique, whereas English typists used a double space.

Edit: add full reference

The practice originally came from typesetting. If anything, it's more relevant and appropriate now than it was in the days when your font choices were limited to 12-point Pica and Elite.

Programs that do typesetting for you (Markdown, LaTeX), will ignore the number of spaces after the period in your "source" code and lay it out in the output with a single space.

I've gotten in the habit of single-space in variable-width fonts, and double-space in fixed-width fonts.

Not so for the default mode in LaTeX.

It tries to guess which periods indicate end-of-sentence (based on whether the next letter is capitalized) and will add additional horizontal space accordingly, unless you tell it not to by declaring your document uses “French Spacing”.

(Edit: and my memory may be serving me incorrectly here, but I recall 20 years ago having a support package that also detected double-space in the source as another indicator of end-of-sentence, but that was probably a non standard extension.)

I remember reading the TeXbook and learning that the space after a period is wider if there's a capital afterwards and the various ways of suppressing this behavior.

So it's a TeX thing, not LaTeX.

Thanks. I appreciate the attention to detail! FWIW, the distinction between the two is blurry given that most people I’ve known in academia never use TeX directly other then through LaTeX.

To be clear, it’s both.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2024338/latex-sometimes-...

LaTeX is based on TeX

Won’t that mess up titles like Dr. Livingstone and Mr. President?

Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

Yup:

  Prof.\@ Crumb

...is the behavior suppressor.

I usually force a narrow space after titles: Dr.\,Livingstone

> Splitting text into sentences is actually really hard.

It would be a lot less hard if we were able to unambiguously tell the computer whether a period ends a sentence. I wonder how we could possibly do that...

(Less sarcastically: a lot of Unix programs - Emacs, vim, troff, etc. - solve this problem by defaulting to double-spaced sentences, thus resolving the ambiguity. Kinda odd that this ain't the Tex approach; there's already precedent by using doubled-up ``backquotes'' and ``single quotes'' to produce “smart double quotes”, and lone `backquotes' and `single quotes' similarly become ‘smart single quotes’.)

This is doubly nonsense. TeX works very hard to make good looking spacing. Markdown emits HTML, which has a completely separate rendering engine for spacing. And the only reason HTML looks wrong is that the programmers of rendering engines weren’t as good as Knuth, and van Rossum’s anti-intellectualism lobbied against semantically rich markup for sentences.

That's not true. Go look at the us constitution, which is not typeset. There are bigger spaces after periods, see article I section 2, lines 3 and 4 for two examples.

That's a weird non-sequitur that has nothing to do with the topic, considering that the Constitution was handwritten, but it's still interesting to read about how things were done in that era:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Shallus

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9061831/declaration-of-indepen...

So, thanks for the diversion down that particular rabbit hole, I guess.

> The practice [of two spaces after the period] originally came from typesetting

I'm just challenging that assertion, which is commonplace, but there's plenty of evidence to the contrary, many of which you can see with your own eyes.

It goes back much further than the late 18th century. This is a decent summary, although a bit short on citations for my liking:

https://thecontractsguy.net/2014/02/02/spacing-after-periods...

   Literally centuries of typesetters and 
   printers believed that a wider space was 
   necessary after a period, particularly 
   in the English-speaking world.  It was 
   the standard since at least the time 
   that William Caslon created the first 
   English typeface in the early 1700s (and 
   part of a tradition that went back further),
   and it was not seriously questioned among 
   English or American typesetters until the 
   1920s or so.

Extra space after each sentence was and is a good idea, whether you're talking about handwritten documents or typeset ones. Typewritten documents arguably benefit the least from the practice. Point being, when single-space advocates say that double-spacing is obsolete and unnecessary because we don't use typewriters anymore, they are just plain wrong.

We're agreeing.

It was required by APA until very recently , with the seventh edition. I feel zero shame for never paying that rule a gram of heed.

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