One Space or Two? When did this change? | Hacker News Reader

One Space or Two? When did this change?

chicagomanualofstyle.org

22 pointsiamelgringo30 comments

A few weeks ago I was helping my wife apply to medical school. One school in particular had an online application with a form to answer all the questions. Each essay question had strict character limits.

After spending hours writing, proofing, spell checking, and character couting the essays, my wife tried to copy/paste them into the online form. No dice - over the character limit. She called me in to help. I tried Word => SciTE => form, Word => Notepad => form, and a few others. Nothing worked.

Finally, I pulled up Firebug and did a little digging. Turns out this application was using a rich text editor that was converting any two spaces to a space +   thus counting two spaces as 7 characters.

Needless to say, I did a find/replace for two spaces to one space and her application went through fine. We haven't used two spaces since.

Two spaces are a convention that arose when monospaced fonts were the norm. Now that proportional fonts are the norm, it's just an artifact. CMOS deals with professional publishing, where one space was always the norm.

Two spaces are a convention that arose when monospaced fonts were the norm. Now that proportional fonts are the norm, it's just an artifact.

This was my first thought as well, but why? A monospaced space is larger than a proportional space, so if you used two monospaced spaces, maybe now you should use three proportional spaces. Instead the space between sentences has gotten much smaller.

It's not so much the size of the space, but how tightly the letters of each word are kerned. In a proportional font, all the letters in a word are more tightly packed together, making each word appear as a more separated object. This in turn makes spaces between words easier to see.

And depending on the typeface/typesetter, sentences might also be set with more space after them than is normally between words, though it's quite unlikely to be twice as much. (TeX will do this, for example.)

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.

TeX has reasonable defaults, but it is not all-knowing. A typist who cares about the spacing of his document must memorize TeX's period-spacing rules and carefully annotate the exceptions -- which includes both errors of too much and too little space:

http://john.regehr.org/latex/#little

I think the two-space-at-the-end habit was a typewriter thing. It's now about as obsolete as typewriters.

Sigh... I'm getting to be an old fart.

I suppose things might have changed since I learned touch typing on my Dad's Compaq Chameleon: http://www.ubertechworld.com/museum/images/Compaq_PortableI/...

I'm with you. I get razzed by a copywriting friend of mine all the time. I learned 2 spaces in typing class and nobody ever told me the rule changed. It's such a habit now that I have to think about using just one space.

You can't even get two spaces to display in HTML without forcing one of them (with  ).

I've been using two spaces my entire life, and I'm not about to stop now! I will occasionally use one space when writing online, but I overwhelmingly stick with two.

I came to write the same thing. I tend to use one space when posting in a forum like this but two spaces when I write a paper for class.

I've actually been working on training myself to use one space, and it's a hard habit to change. I was taught to use two spaces by typing teachers, but was recently given a bit of a lesson from a friend who studies typography and designs his own fonts that the correct form is to use a single space.

Two spaces emerged as a convention for reasons mentioned in other posts here, and typing teachers in particular seem to have jumped on that bandwagon. However, the effect on rendered type is that it leaves unpleasant gaps in paragraphs in most popular programs (Word, etc.), and so the correct form according to typography professionals is apparently one space (or slightly more, but then that becomes a rendering issue, not one for the typist to decide). Since I have a huge appreciation for typography (albeit, not enough knowledge of the art itself), I feel it's worth correcting my habit.

I'm the opposite. I've used one space all my life but my AP English teacher wants us to use 2 spaces.

Go figure...

Mavis Beacon taught me two spaces. Since two spaces is syntactically equivalent to one in the text processing software I use (mostly LaTeX), and it's semantically meaningful, I'm going to stick to two.

Given that emacs has a command 'forward-sentence, which depends on this, I really really like two spaces at the end of a sentence.

Thank you! transpose-sentences also depends on this. I never put two spaces after a sentence (never knew you were supposed to do that) and when I tried transpose-sentences for the first time a few days ago it didn't work. It was one of those things that's puzzling, but not enough so that I wanted to take the time to figure it out. I'm glad I know now.

Use this (maybe in your .emacs) and you can transpose sentences with only 1 space:

(setq sentence-end-double-space nil) (setq sentence-end "[.?!][]\"')]\$$\\|\t\\| \$[ \t\n]")

From my .emacs:

    ;Sets sentence end to be .?!, but with 1-space after sentence terminator rather than 2.
    ;I have no idea why 2 spaces is the default.
    (setq sentence-end "[.?!][]\"')}]*\\($\\| $\\|	\\| \\)[ 	]*")

You might also want

    (setq sentence-end-double-space nil)

in your .emacs. Its a variable used for filling defined in paragraphs.el.

Good typesetting systems such as (La)TeX ignore the typed spaces; instead, they handle the situation automatically by inserting extra space after periods, regardless of the spacing in the source text.

Unfortunately, LaTeX is the only typesetting system I know which is accessible to non-professional typesetters and its not very widely used. I wish MS Word and OOo were as good. At least then people wouldn't be against paragraph justification as they are now.

Agreed; with modern CPUs there's just no excuse for the ugly typesetting in Word and OpenOffice.

I wonder how many sheets of paper it would save annually. I also wonder if we should gzip books before they're printed.

Definitely! (I just realized that gzipping your files before downloading via the web probably does not change the data on the wire --- as most browsers and http servers support gzip encryption transparently.)

Huh, a lot of those reasons came down to "crap software."

Word, we're all looking at you.

Yup.

As for the rest, yeah, two spaces. A period's often a single pixel with 4-8 grey antialiased dots around it.

I've always done one space. Why do more work?

It's called French spacing. I learned that "it's just a weird English habit", but the Wikipedia article is a lot more detailed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_spacing

if your sentence ends in an acronymn, it helps. i vote for the additional spacing.

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