Why I Two-Space (2012)
stevelosh.com
stevelosh.com
Whichever way I prefer to write, or read, it doesn't make enough difference as a reader to justify even mentioning it, let alone screeding about it.
Anyone writing, complaining, even merely picking a side out loud and trying to defend one side in forums like this, are all automatically wrong because of that, regardless which side, regardless what their arguments are.
The far worse crime than being in the wrong about double spacing, is feeling that you even have any valid place trying to dictate something like that to anyone else.
It's not like the Oxford Comma. ;)
If I'm to argue, I'd start by pointing out the amount of space is not an integer. So arguing 1 or 2 is already wrong. Kerning of the font take cares about the spacing you have there. So the advice of using 1 space is really that it is understood that you have a single space after period, and the designer take that expectation into the kerning decision.
The bottom line to me is that if you can't publish a book via a "traditional" publisher using that typographical decision then it is very likely to be wrong. Argue all you want about why you don't care about that. But for many people that reflects on the care/effort you put into your work, and likely I shouldn't care about work like this.
The other thing I hate much is the trivialization, which is related to the "I don't care" culture. From my experience, many things are trivial at first glance. But it is likely wrong. Most things are very complicated with a lot of subtleties involved. Seeing them as trivial is often a sign that they really don't understand the subject very well.
With markdown especially with version controlled text, start a new line for each new sentence. You can start doing this right now. Don't burden yourself with the thoughts of single space vs double space. Simply add a space after the period and press enter to start a new line after each sentence.
Add an empty line to show that you are now in a new paragraph. My rationale is it will help version control software diff your text better. Thoughts?
It also lets you shuffle around sentences when editing which is nice.
[1]https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-recommended-practices/...
Spent too many years in pine, I will type prose at 78 column width until the day I die.
Hopefully before that happens, change management tools will stop being completely moronic about diffing prose.
But whether that happens or not: one line per sentence?
Not a chance.
Unless I'm making a point.
The one downside is precisely that long sentences become harder to read because they either don't wrap, resulting in very wide text that's thus hard to read, or else are visually wrapped oddly (very uneven line lengths, again making them hard to read).
I first learned to use a computer when I was almost in high school and I soon discovered the amazing world of project Gutenberg. Even in 2001, I still only had access to dial up Internet (and that was a huge privilege in my eyes being in the middle of nowhere). Therefore, I loved downloading plain text files of books. I didn't like reading them as such though. I don't remember exactly why but I loved the "justify" feature in a word processor and would copy paste all the text file contents into word and delete all the line breaks to make it "nice". I don't remember why I did it but I read quite a few books from project Gutenberg like this.
Coming back to the topic, I'd say I am ok with leaving out the training space like others suggested or even breaking down a single sentence to multiple lines where appropriate. For example, I could turn the previous sentence into three lines. First linee has just the words coming back to the topic. Second line has everything before the oe and the third has the rest. That is just one possibility.
One good thing about things like markdown is that Only the writer and the editors have to fight with the uneven line lengths. The presentation is (at least hopefully) abstracted for the reader. Maybe we could even normalize the output text file from markdown as 80 columns. In this scenario, markdown is our source file that we "compile" into text or html as necessary.
To further illustrate my idea, here is the first paragraph from a tale of two cities [text file](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/98/98-0.txt)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way --in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
As a reader, you don't even have to think about where the line breaks are (: as an editor you can see "it was the" line up nicely for all those lines. I wish I could remember why I loved justify so much though...
In particular, it plays well with most revision control systems which are line-oriented.
That said: revision control which is semantically aware of textual structure and sentences would also be useful. And I much prefer composing with sentences separated by horizontal rather than vertical whitespace, though I suspect I could change that pattern. It would however mean I'd be changing practices based on specific composing contexts.
That said, I two-space.
Many people do recommend this (newline per sentence.) This comes up for example in the issue tracker of pandoc.
This is complete different as 2 spaces change the final representation, while newline-as-space in markdown source do not.
So, it's obviously fine to two-space if you're using a typewriter.
It's therefor also fine if you're writing in a monospace/fixed-width font.
But don't do it with proportional width fonts! They are designed with various hints in place to render appropriately as one should typeset them, adjusting spacing between various letters, and of course rendering periods and decimal points correctly, contextually!
HTML will also ignore extra spaces, accordingly. Word processors will either highlight consecutive spaces as a typo or even auto-correct as you type. So I guess not much worry here if it's a habit.
The Right Answer here is for the software that renders text to do the Right Thing no matter how many spaces the user types after a period. HTML already does this so there is an existence proof that this is possible.
This is the standard explanation I see everywhere, but I don't get it.
With two spaces, the gap after a period is longer than a gap after a comma. Why is that "obviously fine" in fixed-width but not in variable-width?
As it should be. A period is a full stop, not a continuation.
It seems like it is actually correct if you're using a fixed-width font by that rationale.
> HTML will also ignore extra spaces, accordingly. Word processors will either highlight consecutive spaces as a typo or even auto-correct as you type.
This seems like the best solution and just make technology eat the extra space one way or another so it never matters.
So in summary: always double space after a period and let the presentation layer determine the layout.
Glad that is finally sorted.
That's wrong. Other than LaTeX, nothing else that I know of typesets the space following periods correctly. Not browsers, not word processors. Here's an easy test: Does it put more space after a sentence ending period than after a "Mr."?
> You might also infer from the article's tone that "you get to feel superior to those Neanderthals that use two spaces"
I see we're very polite on your side:
> don't worry, I'm using two spaces like a sane person
We already have spaces, tabs, and non-breaking spaces (" " in HTML), for example.
ASCII already has a number of field-specific terminators: STX, ETX, EOF, LF, FF, FS, GS, RS, US, etc. Though those tend to be little used.
In terms of ease of use, existing standards, and ready interpretation, a doubled space as an inter-sentence indicator has numerous benefits.
The main point is that it’s useful for the token that separates words to be different from the one that separates sentences. So three spaces would have no advantage over two.
> It doesn't matter what editor you use. Vim, Emacs, TextMate, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Gedit, Notepad++? All of them use monospaced fonts.
Most modern editors support proportional fonts. The obvious exceptions are those that run in a terminal, like Vim.
In 2012 when the article was written I was using Visual Studio, various JetBrains IDEs, and Araxis Merge, and they all supported proportional fonts at the time. I've been writing all my code in proportional fonts for at least 10-15 years.
Other editors that support proportional fonts today include VS Code and the editor in the Meld diff tool.
I'm glad two-space died, and I no longer two-space. In my school it was simply used as an authority or power over the children by a typing teacher who was frustrated in a lot of things, but mostly in her marriage.
Mrs. Botana - You were the most hated teacher at our school, and you telling us you recognized how hated you were solved nothing. Enjoy your two-space.
Maybe you need to understand that this isn't YOUR experience and I'm accurately talking about a degenerate teaching professional who did their best to be an absolute scumfuck piece of shit.
I recognize people still read print, but I can safely say that 90%+ of all of the reading I have done in the past month has been digital. I don't think most people choose vim over a word editor like google docs or microsoft word when writing. The most common ebooks I read are in the epub format, which is based on html. The only pdfs I read are technical papers that are in two column format. There doesn't seem to be a place where two spacing will make a difference.
Looking at the page source shows the sentences are two-spaced. But that's not how any of the information is presented. If the author is used to it, there's no reason to change it. I believe that being trained to write the way most people write is more important.
It doesn't take much to search+replace two blank spaces with one. Going in the opposite direction is only a little more involved with having to specify a punctuation so you don't end up double spacing every word as well.
The effect is most pronounced for double spacers like myself, for whom the exact opposite is true of your first argument.
That can't be common, can it? More space making it actually harder to tell where sentences end?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
Most computer typesetting systems are written by Americans. To the extent they interpret "." as a sentence marker, what they do is therefore by origin of software heavily dominated by what the US marketplace in style expects.
Most computer typesetting systems I use are contextually NOT WYSIWYG and involve embedding the markup and processing it through explicit steps. Whilst I believe these are more capable of being told "honour a different style" the style guides tend(ed) to reflect publishing paper journal constraints to space and style, not general writing style. So using T/ROFF with the -ms macros, or LaTeX with specific IEEE journal settings.
Microsoft claims to honour locale pretty strongly. I have no idea if this leaks into style beyond s/z spelling and date-time.
It isn't any kind of quest of mine to convert the world, so I would not characterize it as a losing battle. Perhaps quaint.
Good for editor navigation. You can split on two spaces to count sentences for example, so code can make sense of it.
Unless, like me, you've configured your editor to use a proportional font.