Hacker News Reader

Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

I used this program to reteach myself touch typing a few years ago.

What I found annoying was the course's insistence on having to type two spaces after the end of a sentence. This was a practice I've never heard of before that and seemed to be pretty pointless with modern typeset software.

That's why I used sed to modify the tutorial files to only use one space after a period.

View on HN

That's a bad bug and the default should be changed. In publishing production environments based on word-processing software, the default now is always to have just one space after each period in a manuscript.

(Yeah, I learned to type under the old rule, but I am OLD, and no one learning to type now should type more than one space after a period ending a sentence.)

I have no idea why you were downvoted.

Some editors prevent you from adding two spaces.

(https://www.fnal.gov/docs/products/lyx/Tutorial.tex.html)

It's something I still do. I can't break the habit.

32 here and I learned the two space rule. Still haven't broken the habit. Thankfully on iOS if you hit space twice quickly it inserts a period and one space.

I'm 21 and learned using the two spaces method. I still do it instinctively, I've been trying to unlearn the behaviour though.

To my mind the two-space rule still applies when you are writing text to be displayed in a mono-space font. Otherwise, one space, yes. This unfortunately means you need different habits for the two environments, unless the software compensates somehow.

Personally, I think the two space rule is simply bad. Writing text "to be displayed in a mono-space font" confuses content with presentation.

If you're designing a system that will be displaying things in a monospace font, making it automatically add additional spacing may be reasonable but that is itself an application of the rule! If you're using an existing system (or, say, laying out a poster in a monospace font), then the notion that "you should ignore the rule because to do otherwise would be confusing content with presentation" is a confusion of another kind.

One place I'm a bit torn is comments in code, but I think I come down on the side that says "my editor shouldn't be trying to guess which comments are simply paragraphs of text and which may have things I'm trying to line up - monospace should work like monospace" and in this case you should be adding two spaces for clarity.

20 year old here who learned the two space rule in elementary. However, they didn't teach us how to properly type until high school, so all (or most) the bad habits I learned beforehand, including the two space rule, went out the door as a result.

It was standard practice for typing on a typewriter which wasn't proportionally spaced. For some of us, especially when using monospace fonts (e.g.: in a terminal or text editor) text still looks wrong when a sentence-ending period, or a colon, aren't followed by two spaces. Contextually, it's a useful indicator to distinguish between an abberviation followed by a capital letter, vs. the proper end of a sentence. This isn't usually a problem, though it can be. Much as the Oxford comma isn't desperately needed until it is.

So I asked the Dr. Parent should we conduct the confirming test?

I've always heard that monospace characters were the reason for two spaces after a period , but I don't understand that reasoning. To me, a monospaced font would especially require only one space, because the period is already using a lot of space on its own. Wouldn't having a period followed by two spaces–in a fixed-width font–be even more whitespace than in a proportional font?

Incidentally, that's how emacs recognize sentences by default:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Sen...

But I always set sentence-end-double-space to nil.

Vi traditionally has the same behavior, vim recognises one space but in some vi compatible modes requires two.

Neither "So I asked the Doctor Parent should we conduct the confirming test?" nor "So I asked the Doctor. Parent should we conduct the confirming test?" are gramatical in the first place, and there are much better ways of clarifying what is intended than single or double space after the period. Having said that, I have no doubt that an example where both options are gramatical - and possibly even plausible! - could be found.

It was the best I could come up with at the time. Most certainly not an ideal example.

There's a startup option (-w for word processor mode [1]) that changes this behaviour (as well as enabling word wrap). It's a big improvement, but not quite perfect IIRC.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/doc/#Invoking

I still prefer to use two spaces after a period.

(Genuinely asking) Are modern typesetting software applications able to tell when a dot is really an end-of-sentence marker and when it is not? I know this is not too hard but getting it right everytime is.

Based on my experience writing this Ruby library (https://github.com/SlyShy/Tactful_Tokenizer/) it's a somewhat difficult challenge. Most programs don't bother doing it accurately, as a naive solution will get you 80% of the way there. Of course, if you actually care about sentences (like I do), that's unacceptable.

GNU Emacs supports sentence skip only if there are two spaces after the period. Its not surprising that another GNU product would reinforce this behavior. Ya, its also an old publishing practice, but at least LaTex will ignore it.

You should be able to customize that by setting 'sentence-end-double-space' to nil.

I'm not a heavy emacs user, but my adviser was (and he wanted the two spaces for his benefit).

These days I put my sentences on separate lines anyways, which works out well for LaTeX and RCS.

I was taught this way and I happen to be rather young (19). I find that most of my classmates were never taught this rule, and they usually think it's some sort of error when proofreading my writing. It reminds me of the "don't button the bottom button on a suit" story.

I think good-ol' vi follows this convention to split sentences, which can then be skipped using parentheses. vim modernized this.

> on having to type two spaces after the end of a sentence.

Sounds like Markdown.

That is why good typing tests, online or not, do allow for either one or two spaces after the end of a sentence. There are a lot of people used to just one, just are there a lot of people used to two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com