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Comment by russellallen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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