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Comment by chalst | Hacker News Reader

> One space between sentences: Always one — never two. Some topics in this book will offer you choices. Not this one ... Or more generally: put exactly one space after any punctuation. - http://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences.h...

Sigh - another source for a rule that shows evidence of thinking like a writer, not as a typographer. We can forgive Bringhurst, but ... the single vs. double space choice is a false dichotomy in a world with proportional fonts, font expansion, stretchable space, and the like, since there is no such thing as the width of a space.

TeX, for instance, allows the space after sentences to stretch more than interword space, and gives inter-sentence space that is 1/3 wider than interword space where there is no space (default for CMR).

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That changes nothing at all. One space is correct and nothing else.

This particular document doesn't even touch on more advanced tings like this so it makes sense to leave it out and keep it to the simplified but still correct statement: One space, nothing else. That's it. If you do something else you are wrong.

What does "one space" even mean? Does it mean only one character's width? No, because that varies. Does it mean the same width as all other spaces? No, because as explained above typesetting systems often make the space longer, and many traditional typographers did likewise. Does it mean only pressing the spacebar once? No, because that won't make a difference in many systems like TeX, HTML.

It's just a typographical shibboleth, nothing more.

> Does it mean only pressing the spacebar once? No, because that won't make a difference in many systems like TeX, HTML.

Seeing as the original article always tells you how to do things in Word, it means exactly that. Any system that is not not WYSIWYG will have no problems here, Word does. And since most people use Word, this is relevant. It doesn't matter that TeX doesn't take it into account, because this is not primarily written for TeX users. TeX does many of these things, but it is not what most people use, especially those who do not know anything at all about typography.

The book is intended to be general; from the introduction: The typographic rules in this book aren’t specific to particular software. You can apply these rules in just about any modern page-layout program or word processor.

To emphasise what I said above: the book is passing off a didactic point about authoring (yes, many newspapers and publishers want their journalists and authors to follow the one-space rule in their copy) into a simplistic rule of typography, one which happens to be meaningless in many contexts and is based on fallacious reasoning.

What happens when I want to copy and paste your text into something other than TeX or HTML?

It seems pretty obvious what is meant - put one space in, and let the font deal with how wide it should be. Yes, this doesn't mean "physically press the space key once" in things like TeX or HTML - it means don't force extra spacing (i.e. by adding non-breaking spaces). The point is to let the font handle it.

"One space" has no meaning in the finished TeX document. Space is a variable quantity. When using English typographical rules, the amount of space between sentences is larger than the amount of space between words, but both are variable.

In the TeX source code, you can put as many spaces you want between words and sentences, TeX does not mind and will produce the exact same result.

So in the context of TeX documents, "One space is correct and nothing else" is either meaningless or false.

Because TeX corrects your mistakes. Not for any other reason.

One space is correct. It's so correct, TeX will even automatically strip spaces away if you make more than one. (Happens on the web, too, by the way.)

So how do you tell TeX where the ends of sentences are? I rather like the simple interface that is 'press space bar twice'. Do I have to put something on abbreviations instead?

TeX considers a period to be the end of a sentence unless it's preceded by a capital letter (in which case it assumes it's an initial or part of an acronym).

For abbreviations, you should explicitly insert a space control sequence (\<space>) or a non-breaking space (~) after the period.

TeX has a rather unintuitive trick for this. If you have a period immediately after a word followed by whitespace, it is taken to mark the end of a sentence. In order to indicate that a period does not end a sentence, you prefix the space by \@, for example, in `Cf.\@ Something`.

Just in case that sounds too simple, there is an exception for initials: `P. G. Wodehouse` is treated the same as `P.\@ G.\@ Wodehouse`. If you want to cancel this, prefix the period by `\@`.

This kind of thing makes Latex a hard sell to a general audience.

See http://latex-alive.tumblr.com/post/827168808/correct-punctua...

AFAIK TeX (in English language mode) puts a bit more space between sentences than between words. You can get the continental European style of equal spaces with the command \frenchspacing.

> TeX does not mind and will produce the exact same result.

I think if you think about it, you'll realize this is just TeX agreeing with what he said about one space.

But I'm confused. Why is two spaces allowed in a monospaced font? Spaces there are already twice as wide as in proportional fonts.

You may be right about exactly one space following a sentence-ending punctuation mark, but generations of students were taught, by very reputable typing curricula, to use two spaces after sentence-ending punctuation that was not at the end of a line. I'm not suggesting that this means they're right and you're wrong--I'm observing that those people represent a pretty good reason for any consumer-oriented application that accepts user prose as input to be able to gracefully handle a second space.

If I put two spaces after a period, am I wrong, or simply differently habituated from people who learned keyboarding in the electronic age? And even if I am objectively wrong, I maintain that my wrong is less egregious than the wrong committed by a program that cannot accommodate that very well-documented and widespread typing error.

While the fonts themselves are proportional, usually each letter (counting space as a letter) has the same width every time, it just happens that an 'i' takes up less space than 'w'. Regular spaces are usually 'en-spaces', meaning the width of the 'n' in whatever typeface you're using.

That being said, spacing is obviously very different in justified type (and a huge pain to set by hand), where it will change depending on which words fit in the line.

Spaces usually are half an en wide. You can compare with the en dash, for example.

This is an interesting article on this "rule":

http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324

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