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Comment by wpollock | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.

In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)

> In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)

Only if you used a typewriter. I was using (La)TeX in the twentieth (1990s), and it defaulted to a rough equivalent of 1.5 spaces (see \spacefactor).

Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts, and this was generally not used in 'properly' published works with proportional typefaces; see CMoS:

* https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/O...

Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style (§2.1.4) concurs:

* https://readings.design/PDF/the_elements_of_typographic_styl...

* https://webtypography.net/2.1.4

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St...

Good to know! I am reminded of using *roff in the 1980s. Punctuation such as periods at the end of lines marked end of sentences, and nroff would insert two spaces in that case.

  In HN, you can force two spaces between
  sentences.  But only in code blocks.

vim still does it, when joining lines.

> Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts

I could never agree with this, because monospace fonts are already adding extra space with the dot character, which is much narrower in proportional fonts. That fact alone makes the visual gap already similarly wide as it would be in typeset proportional text. Adding a second space makes it much too wide visually (almost three positions wide). It looks like badly typeset justified text.

(I understand why people are doing it, I just don’t agree on aesthetic grounds.)

Thanks for sharing. I'm a double spacer, but have to agree it does look to wide most of the time, while single-spacing looks too narrow. 1.5 sounds like a greatGoldilocks spacing. I only wish it were easier to use.

Because I learned to type on a typewriter, I always ended every sentence with a period and two spaces. But LaTeX was kind enough to not care whether I put one or two spaces, and gave me the right proportional spacing regardless.

Very annoying how HTML changes your two spaces into one space.

I use “ ” if I really need a blank space.

Try   [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space (see specifically the example section)

When I was growing up (90s), we were taught that either one or two spaces was acceptable practice.

I was thought two spaces was for fixed width (typewriters), whereas one space was for word processors with proportional typesetting.

I eventually gave up on this, but I always favored it because a period with two spaces after it very clearly designated the end of a sentence, as opposed to something like an abbreviation. It made parsing English just a little bit easier.

Indeed, Emacs has historically used the double space at the end of a sentence to provide movement and cut functions operating on sentences.

I think Google Docs does this automatically.

I've been called out on this by coworkers in code review. It's mildly infuriating.

These are the moments that I need to have a confrontation about not bringing up unimportant things. The person who wrote the comment intended to communicate things about the code. The person who brought up the punctuation could change if if they really wanted to, if it was actually productive work. It's about "catching" someone else and having a reason to nip them on the ear. Review like that is what belongs in the garbage.

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