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Comment by robot_ | Hacker News Reader

This article is very bitter and inflammatory. In my experience, people only use two spaces after a period because thats what they were taught and are too stubborn to change.

The main typographic case against two spaces after a period is that it breaks up the flow of text and creates rivers inside the text block. Counter space is the most important aspect of a typeface, and by adding two spaces after a period you are breaking the rhythm of the text.

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> people only use two spaces after a period because thats what they were taught and are too stubborn to change.

Are you sure it's stubbornness that you're describing? I was taught to use 2 spaces when I was 5 or 6, and in the meantime I have been typing things for the majority of my life. When I pound out two spaces at the end of a sentence it's not out of pride or because I'm consciously thinking about it.

Telling me I'm "too stubborn" to write a single space is like saying I'm too stubborn to change my handwriting or use a Dvorak layout; these things would require conscious effort and attention to things that I am not currently thinking about, or to change what I am writing and this would slow me down. Or, considering how young I was taught, you might as well say I'm "too stubborn" to stop other current habits developed at around the same time, like bathing regularly or brushing my teeth.

Frankly if I have to please folks like you I'd rather just pipe everything I write into sed s/\ \ /\ /g. That way I don't have to drop my productivity by consciously thinking about spacing between sentences. OTOH, not one person has ever mentioned this habit to me, so it must not really be a problem.

I honestly don't know what I expected from programmers discussing typography... so much misinformation in this thread

A: People do it out of stubbornness.

B: I don't think I'm stubborn. I do it totally unconsciously since a very young age and it would be hard for me to change, similar to handwriting. Besides, nobody seems to notice the difference.

A: (Sigh.) Programmers just won't understand...

Sorry, but I see that last reply as neither here nor there. It's actually kind of laughable, like some stereotypical "design-snob" thing to say.

Without design snobs, programming snobs would never reach the masses.

Design snobs used to have the opposite of the opinion that they have now about after-period spacing, and had valid semantic reasons for having that opinion. People whining about how a wider space after a period is absolutely wrong are more fashion snobs than design snobs.

Also, I really just had to give up. There's no point in educating those who are too stubborn to entertain an alternative to what they learned at the age of 5. Why do you think there are still so many racist individuals in the US?

I don't see any support of your position in your comments, just that people who do it differently from you are stubborn and uneducated. (It's very ironic because it doesn't seem like you've considered how it'd be if someone flipped this the other way and directed such comments at you.)

Meanwhile I've typed double spaces for multiple decades and haven't ever had anyone ask me to do it the other way. Seems you've a lot of people to educate.

Just because you say "I don't think I'm being stubborn" does not make it so. You clearly are. No one claimed bathing or brushing are bad habits that should be changed.

I learned how to type when I was 10 with double spaces after periods. I realized it looked bad/was unnecessary and now I single space. Wasn't very hard to make the conscious effort to change it. /just saying

Sounds like that works for you. I don't think it would work for me. Unlike some in this thread though, I am not going to say that my preferences work for everybody.

The article reads like a reasonable response to what is essentially a bullshit rewriting of history.

Now, there are certainly arguments in favor of one space, but "history" is not one of them :)

The argument by typographers has no grounding in history, it's a choice based on preferred visual rhythm.

But as the article points out, the typographers claim otherwise.

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