Whether I 2-space or not, the more important thing is, I would never try to tell you what to do over something so trivial.
Whichever way I prefer to write, or read, it doesn't make enough difference as a reader to justify even mentioning it, let alone screeding about it.
Anyone writing, complaining, even merely picking a side out loud and trying to defend one side in forums like this, are all automatically wrong because of that, regardless which side, regardless what their arguments are.
The far worse crime than being in the wrong about double spacing, is feeling that you even have any valid place trying to dictate something like that to anyone else.
I really hate this kind of "I don't care" logic floating among hackers or even just scientists.
If I'm to argue, I'd start by pointing out the amount of space is not an integer. So arguing 1 or 2 is already wrong. Kerning of the font take cares about the spacing you have there. So the advice of using 1 space is really that it is understood that you have a single space after period, and the designer take that expectation into the kerning decision.
The bottom line to me is that if you can't publish a book via a "traditional" publisher using that typographical decision then it is very likely to be wrong. Argue all you want about why you don't care about that. But for many people that reflects on the care/effort you put into your work, and likely I shouldn't care about work like this.
The other thing I hate much is the trivialization, which is related to the "I don't care" culture. From my experience, many things are trivial at first glance. But it is likely wrong. Most things are very complicated with a lot of subtleties involved. Seeing them as trivial is often a sign that they really don't understand the subject very well.
I don't agree with the tone of the original article but I do think we should discuss our preferences. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion on it. There's a difference between opinionated suggestions and arrogant mandates. This forum does a good job avoiding arrogant mandates.
With markdown especially with version controlled text, start a new line for each new sentence.
You can start doing this right now.
Don't burden yourself with the thoughts of single space vs double space.
Simply add a space after the period and press enter to start a new line after each sentence.
Add an empty line to show that you are now in a new paragraph.
My rationale is it will help version control software diff your text better.
Thoughts?
That's a strong argument, and a practice I've seen suggested for LaTeX as well, where a paragraph break is indicated by two carriage returns, rather than one.
In particular, it plays well with most revision control systems which are line-oriented.
That said: revision control which is semantically aware of textual structure and sentences would also be useful. And I much prefer composing with sentences separated by horizontal rather than vertical whitespace, though I suspect I could change that pattern. It would however mean I'd be changing practices based on specific composing contexts.
This is not a bad proposal at all. (Except space after period, in markdown a single newline and a space is equivalent so having a single space then another newline character is weird, not invalid though.)
Many people do recommend this (newline per sentence.) This comes up for example in the issue tracker of pandoc.
This is complete different as 2 spaces change the final representation, while newline-as-space in markdown source do not.
This jolts me and bothers my sensibilities, because I'm so used to wrapping my plain text at 80 columns, but it is a reasonable suggestion.
The one downside is precisely that long sentences become harder to read because they either don't wrap, resulting in very wide text that's thus hard to read, or else are visually wrapped oddly (very uneven line lengths, again making them hard to read).
Memories are so strange.
Things I didn't think about for decades(?) came back from what you said.
I first learned to use a computer when I was almost in high school and I soon discovered the amazing world of project Gutenberg.
Even in 2001, I still only had access to dial up Internet (and that was a huge privilege in my eyes being in the middle of nowhere).
Therefore, I loved downloading plain text files of books. I didn't like reading them as such though.
I don't remember exactly why but I loved the "justify" feature in a word processor and would copy paste all the text file contents into word and delete all the line breaks to make it "nice".
I don't remember why I did it but I read quite a few books from project Gutenberg like this.
Coming back to the topic,
I'd say I am ok with leaving out the training space like others suggested
or even breaking down a single sentence to multiple lines where appropriate.
For example, I could turn the previous sentence into three lines.
First linee has just the words coming back to the topic.
Second line has everything before the oe and the third has the rest.
That is just one possibility.
One good thing about things like markdown is that
Only the writer and the editors have to fight with the uneven line lengths.
The presentation is (at least hopefully) abstracted for the reader.
Maybe we could even normalize the output text file from markdown as 80 columns.
In this scenario, markdown is our source file that we "compile" into text or html as necessary.
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way
--in short, the period was so far like the present period,
that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received,
for good or for evil,
in the superlative degree of comparison only.
As a reader, you don't even have to think about where the line breaks are (: as an editor you can see "it was the" line up nicely for all those lines. I wish I could remember why I loved justify so much though...
Two-spacing is from the era of typewriters. Typerwriters had monospaced typefaces because of how they operated. One space didn't work well enough if the period is rendered center of the type block. To work visually for prose, you'd have had to shift it leftwards so it hugs up against the end of a sentence, leaving a wider gap afterwards. But then you'd end up with awkward decimal points for numbers.... so instead we decided to just use two spaces instead.
So, it's obviously fine to two-space if you're using a typewriter.
It's therefor also fine if you're writing in a monospace/fixed-width font.
But don't do it with proportional width fonts! They are designed with various hints in place to render appropriately as one should typeset them, adjusting spacing between various letters, and of course rendering periods and decimal points correctly, contextually!
HTML will also ignore extra spaces, accordingly. Word processors will either highlight consecutive spaces as a typo or even auto-correct as you type. So I guess not much worry here if it's a habit.
I beg to differ. Computers should serve humans, not the other way around. Humans should not be burdened with the cognitive load of having to worry about different rules for typing depending on what font they are using. Besides, the same text can be rendered in different fonts at different times.
The Right Answer here is for the software that renders text to do the Right Thing no matter how many spaces the user types after a period. HTML already does this so there is an existence proof that this is possible.
> It's therefor also fine if you're writing in a monospace/fixed-width font.
It seems like it is actually correct if you're using a fixed-width font by that rationale.
> HTML will also ignore extra spaces, accordingly. Word processors will either highlight consecutive spaces as a typo or even auto-correct as you type.
This seems like the best solution and just make technology eat the extra space one way or another so it never matters.
So in summary: always double space after a period and let the presentation layer determine the layout.
> They are designed with various hints in place to render appropriately
That's wrong. Other than LaTeX, nothing else that I know of typesets the space following periods correctly. Not browsers, not word processors. Here's an easy test: Does it put more space after a sentence ending period than after a "Mr."?
Answer to this probably is just to use different kind of space such as non-breaking space. While LaTeX has good typography, it's really not the only game in town, and not the only tool that can achieve proper typesetting. I'd argue it is easier to learn proper typesetting using LaTeX, but other softwares, even Word, can achieve good typography if you understand the subject and software well.
The main point is that it’s useful for the token that separates words to be different from the one that separates sentences. So three spaces would have no advantage over two.
That was just one of the many points in the article. It's actually not a point at all unless one uses Vim with the specified setting (which you can only do if all the text you edit uses two spaces).
Since you suggest that route, a semantic differentiator between inter-word, inter-element (e.g., "Dr. Gupta", "Sr. Director"), inter-sentence, and inter-paragraph whitespace could be argued for.
We already have spaces, tabs, and non-breaking spaces (" " in HTML), for example.
ASCII already has a number of field-specific terminators: STX, ETX, EOF, LF, FF, FS, GS, RS, US, etc. Though those tend to be little used.
In terms of ease of use, existing standards, and ready interpretation, a doubled space as an inter-sentence indicator has numerous benefits.
To me, two-space will often break the flow of the text while reading, because the gap between the period and the next word often exceeds the gap between the current line and the next line down. The gestalt theory of perception explains how we mentally group objects by their proximity. If the next word is closer to the bottom line than it is to the period that came before it, then the hierarchy of connection is broken. I haven't done a study, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it would take slightly more cognitive load to rearrange that hierarchy in your head. I believe this may be why some people perceive two-space as "ugly". It also explains why text with a too-small line height is equally unpleasant.
I can't read technical matter written with two spaces. My brain inserts a long pause. I can't comprehend it, at least not without intentional extra mental effort. It's really weird and frustrating. I can read my 6 year old's scribble handwriting though. Haha
> It doesn't matter what editor you use. Vim, Emacs, TextMate, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Gedit, Notepad++? All of them use monospaced fonts.
Most modern editors support proportional fonts. The obvious exceptions are those that run in a terminal, like Vim.
In 2012 when the article was written I was using Visual Studio, various JetBrains IDEs, and Araxis Merge, and they all supported proportional fonts at the time. I've been writing all my code in proportional fonts for at least 10-15 years.
Other editors that support proportional fonts today include VS Code and the editor in the Meld diff tool.
I learned two space in keyboard classes but hated every second of it. It made no sense. And to a kid who loves to push authority I always asked "Why am I doing this arbitrary thing no-one can give evidence as to why?"
I'm glad two-space died, and I no longer two-space. In my school it was simply used as an authority or power over the children by a typing teacher who was frustrated in a lot of things, but mostly in her marriage.
Mrs. Botana - You were the most hated teacher at our school, and you telling us you recognized how hated you were solved nothing. Enjoy your two-space.
She was hated for aggressively screaming at students and taking out her anger for the life events she professed to us BEFORE our class and teaching period started.
Maybe you need to understand that this isn't YOUR experience and I'm accurately talking about a degenerate teaching professional who did their best to be an absolute scumfuck piece of shit.
Two spacing does not increase legibility of the information. That is the only meaningful metric I care about. If there are studies to show that two-spacing vs single spacing has a meaningful difference in how quickly a human parses or understands information, I will care about changing spacing. The author argues comfort, but because I am so used to single spacing, the two-spaced writing feels awkwardly spaced. I can't easily parse where sentences start and end. The other arguments are pointless.
I recognize people still read print, but I can safely say that 90%+ of all of the reading I have done in the past month has been digital. I don't think most people choose vim over a word editor like google docs or microsoft word when writing. The most common ebooks I read are in the epub format, which is based on html. The only pdfs I read are technical papers that are in two column format. There doesn't seem to be a place where two spacing will make a difference.
Looking at the page source shows the sentences are two-spaced. But that's not how any of the information is presented. If the author is used to it, there's no reason to change it. I believe that being trained to write the way most people write is more important.
It doesn't take much to search+replace two blank spaces with one. Going in the opposite direction is only a little more involved with having to specify a punctuation so you don't end up double spacing every word as well.
If anyone is used to reading text based on a specific format, changing that format would affect the ability to skim the text. I am not talking about normal reading, I mean when I have to search for an idea and reference something I had seen previously in text. The spacing changes the density and the expected location. Studies so far have only been able to show that readers function better when they are already used to a specific format.
Nor does one spacing increase legibility. I will continue to two space, because I think it looks better (and alas for those tools that ignore what I want because they thing they know better).
I'm baffled by this debate. It seems like a massive bike shed. If you're writing markdown, or html, or latex, the renderer will decide how much space to put after the sentence. You can put one space, or two, or ten or put each sentence on a separate line (great for keeping your text in version control, btw).
I doubt it. I stopped after about 15 years of double-spacing. The human brain is a lot more malleable than "common sense" would indicate. Single space is as natural to me as double spacing ever was.
I have never agreed with "two space is ugly" because I have always assumed em-space and en-space were being used in typography. It's the closest analogue.
The issue with that analogy is that even with em and en spaces, the "correct" way of using them is based on where you learned their function. For example, the American use of em vs en dash and the British use is different. The guidelines are based on style rules, they aren't even grammar rules.
In effect, style == "is ugly or not ugly" and grammar == "is wrong" and style is highly conditional on education, country of origin, and context. I am british, have used computer typesetting systems since the early 80s, but currently live in Australia which is caught between poles of british-centric and american-centric style guides.
Most computer typesetting systems are written by Americans. To the extent they interpret "." as a sentence marker, what they do is therefore by origin of software heavily dominated by what the US marketplace in style expects.
Most computer typesetting systems I use are contextually NOT WYSIWYG and involve embedding the markup and processing it through explicit steps. Whilst I believe these are more capable of being told "honour a different style" the style guides tend(ed) to reflect publishing paper journal constraints to space and style, not general writing style. So using T/ROFF with the -ms macros, or LaTeX with specific IEEE journal settings.
Microsoft claims to honour locale pretty strongly. I have no idea if this leaks into style beyond s/z spelling and date-time.
I learned about two-spacing only in my 20s, initially thinking that it's interesting but not very useful. Now it just looks like a cute topic to argue about and to have a strong opinion on, or to speculate about conspiring two-spacers, while being generally harmless. Unlike tabs or inferior text editors. As if all the important issues are solved, tabs are eradicated, and it's left to argue about the number of spaces.
I am a two-spacer, largely because I am an Old. However, I do believe it can help with the difference between encountering the period of an abbreviation and one which serves as the end of a sentence. The period here has been operationally overloaded to serve two similar, but not identical, ends.
It isn't any kind of quest of mine to convert the world, so I would not characterize it as a losing battle. Perhaps quaint.
No mention of tactile or auditory feedback for the writer, which I suspect matters. A space between sentences is read differently, with a slight pause, compared to spaces between words. Writers should write that way too, and double spacing would support that by providing subtle auditory and tactile cues, full stop.
It's a convention and it's easier. I don't really care though. Obviously both work just fine, and that's all I ask. Just don't be a heathen.and.not.space.at.all.
Vim's sentence-aware navigation is a strong argument, though it's hardly the only text editor which does so, and for which two-spacing affords benefits.
Whichever way I prefer to write, or read, it doesn't make enough difference as a reader to justify even mentioning it, let alone screeding about it.
Anyone writing, complaining, even merely picking a side out loud and trying to defend one side in forums like this, are all automatically wrong because of that, regardless which side, regardless what their arguments are.
The far worse crime than being in the wrong about double spacing, is feeling that you even have any valid place trying to dictate something like that to anyone else.
It's not like the Oxford Comma. ;)