Slashdot Mirror
Sentence Spacing — 1 Space or 2?
An anonymous reader noted an epic battle is waging, the likes of which has not been seen since we all agreed that tab indenting for code was properly two spaces. He writes "Do you hit the space bar two times between sentences, or only one? I admit, I'm from the typewriter age that hits it twice, but the article has pretty much convinced me to change. My final concern: how will my word processor know the difference between an abbr. and the end of a sentence (so it can stretch the sentence for me)? I don't use a capital letter for certain technical words (even when they start a sentence), making it both harder to programmatically detect a new sentence and more important to do so. What does the Slashdot community think?"
we all agreed that tab indenting for code was properly two spaces
Say what?!?? Who made that decision? In the java world, 4 spaces is pretty standard.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Well fuck you too, then.
sic transit gloria mundi
I do two spaces, except on my iPhone. It does one space automatically after double tapping the space bar for a period. Oh...and I still do the tab indents when I code (which is pretty rare anymore...my C++ is so rusty it belongs in a scrap heap).
This space for rent...
[Insert one thousand opinions here]
The only one that matters: Is it still readable?
We have bigger problems in the world than "one space or two" ... for example, people's atrocious speling.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I've been an editor (copy editor, proofreader, senior editor, etc.) for 10 years now. One space.
Two spaces are appropriate for typewriters and similar monospaced fonts (Courier, Monaco, Andale Mono, Consolas, Vera, Deja Vu mono)
One space for proportional fonts (Times, Helvetica, almost everything.)
Sentences are not stretched, paragraphs are.
(and they have their own invisible sign(s))
Old enough to have typed on a typewriter as a child, so twice.
As an interesting note, the iPhone auto-enters a period when you double space, so the tradition is still partially alive, at least.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
I always used 1.5 lines between paragraphs. So I don't see why you shouldn't use 1.5 spaces after ending a sentence.
But seriously, it's pretty much exactly the same problem... a single space between paragraphs might not be distinguishable between, say, a new entry on a list, especially lists with long items that don't make use of indentation. So you need a separate paragraph marker. Similarly, we need a way to distinguish between abbreviation periods and sentence-ending periods. A period followed by a half-space sounds perfect!
And as mentioned in the wikipedia link, any whitespace beyond the first is treated as a single whitespace anyway, with HTML / XML / TeX, etc. (Oh noes, I just did an abbreviation and sentence-ending period in one!) I remember being slightly annoyed by how LyX wouldn't register more than one space anywhere in your document (unless it was a special nobreakspace character)... I would just keep hitting space and it would ignore me after the first. But I think that helps get the point across.
I don't know what about an IBM model M and a selectric keyboard implies that there's any difference at all in how you use them. Standard typography has evolved to two spaces between sentences, PERIOD. This is not up for discussion, nor should it be. There's no significantly new information that implies that this should change, except that more and more people are freaking lazy, and language should not evolve because of laziness. Man up, hit that spacebar twice, and quit whining
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
It depends on the font. If it is monospaced (such as on a typewriter) it should be two spaces. If you are using a proportional font, use one space.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Here's a suggestion. Go pick up any book or magazine that's produced by a real publisher. Now count how many of them use double-spaces between sentences. Chances are the number will remain zero by the time you're done counting.
It's easier for a human to determine sentence structure when sentences are set apart by two spaces, too.
What does two spaces get you? Nothing. So why waste the time.
When rendered, HTML is supposed to condense all white space down to a single space anyways.
I always put 2 spaces at the end of a sentence. Oddly, though, I've noticed that when I type, if it's a space between words I use my right thumb. For the end of my sentence, I use my left one. Something I didn't even realize I did until about 6 months ago, and I've been doing this for about 20 years!
What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular.
Seriously, dude. We're starting to worry about you.
The Mac is not a typewriter not only lays down guidelines, but explains the logic behind them, such as why punctuation should be hung, why there should not be two spaces after periods, why text set in all caps should be avoided.
That "article" is wikipedia. It holds no merit with me.
Since when is Wikipedia a valid source to cite? If you change your mind after reading something there I need to get started on a page that sells bridges.
A epic battle? Where! There is only a link to wikipedia FFS!! And even then its still more history orientated! Nor has it anything to do with programming!
This isnt news, this is bollocks!
If your word processor is using the whitespace that you enter, rather than typesetting your text according to whatever your style rules define, you need to get a new word processor. I tend to use two spaces at the end of a sentence, because I tend to edit text in monospace and it gives me a clear visual break between sentences, but that doesn't mean that I expect two spaces in the typeset output - even a web browser is more intelligent than that. Generally I find around 1.2-1.4 gives maximum readability. You want a slightly larger gap between sentences than between words, but double the width of a normal space gives too large a gap for easy reading. Of course, the width of a single space varies slightly from line to line when typesetting justified text.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Use LaTeX (especially if you're typing technical things), then you won't have to worry about it. Type what you mean, and let the typesetter and styles handle the details.
(I should note that if have a period followed by space that isn't a new sentence or a or a period following a capital letter that is, in which case you'll need to mark up the period with \ or @ to let it know, but these are generally fringe cases.)
R.Mo
I use two space characters for writing up a document while a single space character for writing up a HTML file.
During the early area of the internet (around 1990) i held courses and taught new users, how to use the "blank" correctly. Rules were:
People who didn't followed the rule were convicted for excessive blanking.... at least here in germany.
CU, Martin
I'm in my early 20's, so I'm relatively young. I was taught to put two spaces between sentences when learning how to type. I think it's still taught that way, so may people are just getting lazy.
I have always used two spaces. But when I started writing a blog, I noticed that where there are two spaces, and that sentence randomly begins on a new line (I say randomly because anyone can change the font size on their browser to have the lines wrap differently), there will be an unwanted space. This is due to the nature of HTML, where two spaces are interpreted as one, so the blog software will change it to a nbsp; (non-breakable space). So, it looks like the Internet is going to eventually determine the answer for me: I'll have to switch to one space! (Disclaimer: I used two spaces when typing this :)
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Two spaces, atleast that is what i was taught in school.
;-)
Could be one of the only things I remembered from back then...
Myself, I'm a two-space typer. My finger know a sentence-ending period is followed by two spaces and they just do it. However, in certain formats, such as HTML, white space is ignored anyway and then formatted by the format-processor (obviously a web browser in the case of HTML).
While I'm a two-spacer, the medium in which we type is largely making this a moot point.
-geis
At least, that is the standard in the publishing industry. Two spaces is a convention invented by typing teachers for reasons which I've never understood, and which screws up justification once the document needs to be set. One of the first things that has to be done when bringing a document into a page layout program is to search for periods followed by two spaces and replace them with periods and one space. PITA for the Quark/InDesign/Scribus operator.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
This diverging discussion is the perfect example of why it is clear the ideal code indentation is a TAB. Set your editor to display whatever indentation width you like, don't expect to inflict that choice on everyone else. Plus it eliminates the possibility of sloppy partial indentations, and it's fewer keystrokes to boot. Win, win, win.
My final concern: how will my word processor know the difference between an abbr. and the end of a sentence (so it can stretch the sentence for me)?
Given that we're not on typewriters any more, where two spaces after a sentence terminator came from, why does it matter? Proportional fonts, automatic full justification will vary the spaces between words to make the margings align.
Single space after a sentence, noob. Drives me nuts when I see double spaced bullshit. It's almost as bad as seeing more than 3 punctuation marks. If you use more than three you are a fucktard.
All my Java code is two space indented. All my sentences are two spaces after the period. Always has been and always will be.
Slow. News. Day.
So I started reading this, thinking oh this sounds interesting to ponder. And then I got about halfway through the wiki entry and realized, ok no it's not. I learned with two spaces. Let me know when the discussion is done and I'll just do that.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Two spaces, all the way. The only reason not to do two spaces is when one has an actual limit on the space of a message (text messages are notoriously sucky in that regard); whether or not a word processor can decide what is a "pleasing" space between period and beginning of next sentence seems rather silly since the ol' double-tap is ingrained in most of us anyway. It guarantees the space you want, sticks with standards that most people grew up with, and doesn't require any strangeness with detecting abbreviations or retraining those twitchy thumbs.
One space, especially with a font like Courier, is just nasty.
But is there any practical difference? For instance, how many spaces are after this period. Did you guess 11?
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
As Zombieland stated, Rule #2 is Double Tap. I think that makes the answer pretty clear.
Two spaces at the end of sentences - a good typography setter will set the correct width for the end of the sentence, a crappy one will get it wrong no matter how many spaces you use, and for anything else two is the correct answer.
For code, four spaces with soft tab stops, allowing you to use the tab key to insert the correct number of spaces. Easier to read than two spaces (not enough difference in two spaces over more than 10 lines or so), takes up less horizontal space than the stupid 8 space tab stops. Setting up vim to do this is nearly required if you want to program Python, or make any other language look sane.
Were there any questions? If so, why? Try the experiment, realize that most of the world has worked it out already, and go with the flow. The real question was never the number of spaces - it was readability. To maximize that, two for sentences, four for code.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
Find: ".__"
Replace "._"
Document converted. Works in everything I've tried. (Underscore obviously just to show space / dodge HTML single-space rule)
It's always confirmation bias!
It's especially important to use 3 spaces between sentences when you are using a proportional font. That's because the spaces are narrower than the regular characters, and get compressed more when they are pushed through the internet tubes.
Although if you're working on one of these new "TV Typewriters" you might want a different spacing.
And what's the deal with -mdash- in the title? Can't we just go back to using -- instead of having to type m d a s h?
--Joe
What do I think? I think I want to find you and kick you in the ass for wasting my time reading this meaning less crap.
Oh an btw, I use one space on this reply.
And... the thread is over in one comment.
Sorry for the Farkism, but there's really nothing more here to be said.
Comment of the year
Ask "Should I use spaces or tabs for newlines?"
3. Hang out and serf web.
4. Discussion settled? Ask "Should there be brackets around code even if there's only one line? Like this:
If( foo == true)
a=x;
Or is it:
If( foo = true)
{
a=x;
}
sit back and surf web for a few more hours.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Two spaces after a period. That way when I copy to a monospaced program like TextEdit, it still works.
Just because most programs and people use proportional fonts, doesn't mean they all do.
And it's four spaces for indenting. Two is not enough, and eight is just crazy after a couple of levels. If four spaces for indents moves things over to far, then that section needs to break things up a little bit more.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
It's wikipedia's article of the day and so it's over on /. as "an epic battle is waging"?
I missed /. two days ago, was the Action of 1 August 1801 described as "an epic battle in the Global War on Terror"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_of_1_August_1801
I still do all my writing in monospace. I don't use "smartquotes" or any of the other smart-replace type options. I use two spaces after periods everywhere except when texting and on twitter. I like what I type to appear on the screen. Not what the program thinks I want, but what I actually type.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Always, except for the post you just made.
I prefer two space since I believe it looks better. However, over the past few years I've transitioned to using only one space. Many grant applications / abstracts / scientific writing have character limits. Using one space instead of two can make a significant difference when you're fighting for every word.
...there's no such thing as double spaces. Seriously, HTML doesn't support it. I can put as many spaces between sentences as I want in this message, but it won't show.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Oh, and as an aside, the written Thai language doesn't use spaces between words and doesn't need periods at the end of sentences. Basically, each word consists of one or two consonant characters (~44 total, but they're phonetic) which get surrounded by some combination of vowel characters (~26 total), and then might get some intonation marks on top (1-4 in addition to the neutral).
So there's a lot going on, but at least they don't have to worry about this trivia... each sentence consists of a bunch of words run together, separated by a simple space :-P
Ever since proportional fonts came to the desktop, people have found it hard to decide whether they are 'typing' or setting type. (eventually, in the DTP era, there was even a book, The Mac is not a Typewriter).
In typesetting, all word spaces are treated equal (except by TeX, which implements a more typewriter-like convention after periods; it also subtly modifies spacing after commas, semicolons too). This may also be a European/North American distinction, similar to the spaced-en-dash versus unspaced-em-dash convention.
TeX, and the TeXbook, are where many geeks from the CS side of the fence got their first typographic exposure and education. Some of Knuth's aesthetic decisions, like this one, do smell a bit funny to professional typographers. But his implementation of math setting is probably close to definitive (damn it Jim, I'm a typographer not a mathematician).
Wait till they find out that German uses letterspacing for boldfacing, and that it used to be normal practice to have thin spaces before punctuation, etc, etc... The study of typographic conventions is easily a life's work.
you had me at #!
"... since we all agreed that tab indenting for code was properly two spaces."
I've never worked anywhere where that was used.
That seems backwards to me. One space in a proportional font should be much smaller than one in a monospaced font. You'll get a HUGE difference between those two your way. Unless that is your intent, for some unknown reason.
You're concentrating on the wrong character.
In a monospaced font, the period/fullstop is as wide as the W. You need the double-space to compensate for the extra-wide period.
I do all my writing long hand on lined paper and find that two spaces between sentences works best.
I'll throw two spaces in when writing papers for school, but looking back at it from a new perspective, if it comes from an era of typewriting, I should switch to one...
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
I personally prefer two spaces when I'm reading, as I find it easier to separate sentences while scanning text. Also, what's with the whole "since we all agreed that tab indenting for code was properly two spaces." bit? I don't believe I've seen that in any of my coding positions.
<posting target-moderation="funny">
<sentence tone="exclamation">silly boy</sentence>
<sentence>you <contraction>should not</contraction> be mixing content with layout</sentence>
<sentence>use an <acronym>extended markup language</acronym> schema that removes the ambiguity and allows the viewer to determine <alternative-list><item>his</item><item>her</item></alternative-list> preferred layout and punctuation <aside>or even see it presented in <abbrev>text message</abbrev>format allowing accessibility by teenage people</aside> </sentence>
</posting>
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
From TFSubmitter:
"Start the loop with foo=0. foo is incremented in the loop. Exit the loop when foo=10."
vs. "Start the loop by setting foo=0. Each time through the loop, increment foo. Exit the loop when foo=10."
This also works for everything from products ("iProducts account for X% of Apple's sales" / "Apple derives X% of its sales from iProducts") to object/class/function names ( fooBar(baz) works by doing XYZ..." / "When you call fooBar(baz), the function works by doing XYZ...")
English is like Perl. There's more than one way to do it, and it's easy to write illegibly. But the fact that There's More Than One Way To Do It also means it's possible to write legible English. Just like Perl, TMTOWTDI is a feature, not a bug.
This is somewhat a pointless argument in my opinion. It should be whatever I, as the writer, want it to be. Same as line spacing, indents on paragraphs, how much space between paragraphs, etc. I personally think that 2 spaces helps to separate sentences better. Just like anything, I hate it when things like this are dictated by the software package or by HTML. If I want 2 fsking spaces, give me my 2 spaces!
There is a difference, without a doubt. Ever notice how when someone writes something long on the internet, it looks like a giant wall of text? If you're reading a book, and you hit an entire page that's just one paragraph, do you get that same feeling?
That's your browsers rendering. Take a look at the source...
I was taught to use two spaces, but became a convert when I saw that an increasing number of applications trim excess whitespace. The second space was getting lost, so I just quit adding it.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
I hang my head in shame. Sorry.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The space between the punctuation mark and the start of the next sentence should be larger than the space between words in the sentence but not as much as two inter-word spaces.
On typewriters and antiquated word-processing packages (MS Word and copy-cats such as Open Office), only one type of space is available, so one has to choose either one or two spaces to approximate what should be in between. Similar issues arise when formatting numbers with units in text, i.e. "3 mm" or "3mm"? Again, the answer is neither as the spacing should be somewhat in between these two.
Using appropriate modern type-setting software like LaTeX avoids these stupid debates while rendering superior text output.
...was properly two spaces."
Like hell we did.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Because some of us are old and spent many years in a monospace font, and liked it.
Seriously, I've been doing two spaces after a full-stop for so long that I'd never be able to stop doing it (I've been typing since the early/mid 80's). It just becomes part of how you do things. The reality is, it may or may not render in such a way as anybody will notice it -- that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it.
If you were taught to use the two spaces, you're likely to always use that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you read the question, we're talking about text, not code. I couldn't care less what you do with your code; however, as a professional writer, the new standard is one space.
If you really want to get into the the theory behind it, it's actually quite simple. We now use one space to avoid "rivers of white" in text. In short, if you look at a sample of documents that have been double spaced after the punctuation, you'll start to notice lines of white that run throughout the document. This distracts the reader and lowers the readability of the document. In typewriter days, two spaces made a lot of sense. Due to the large variation of widths in characters, it helped keep a more uniform space between sentences. With modern word processors and fonts, the need for the double space as been eliminated.
Now, when you get into typography and design, you're dealing with aesthetic and this will vary on a case by case basis. Letter spacing, kerning, and leading all come into play and it's less about the number of spaces you use and more about how you're using your spaces. In coding, I could see the use for even more than two spaces.
*NOTE* - It might seem contradictory that I'm advocating single spacing, yet I've double spaced between all my sentences. I'm an old school typewriter guy and old habits die hard. This is why modern technology is so great. I have all of my software set to only allow single spacing between sentences. I always do document searches for double spaces. All of my professional writing goes out single spaced. All of my personal writing goes out double spaced, completely out of laziness.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Don't do it. Good typesetting is largely about eliminating unsightly gaps in the text, especially if text is justified, balancing hyphenation and spacing and line length and smaller adjustments. When you double space your sentences, all you do is add an extra step as your typographer does a search-and-replace to eliminate them. Yeah, web browsers do this automatically, but if your extra space sneaks its way into my indesign file it's just going to screw up the spacing that I have specified in the document styles, and likely carefully adjusted (if I'm doing my job well, anyway). Most likely I'm compiling several documents into one, and some of them have extra line breaks and spaces hidden away in them—often inconsistently. And I'll be really upset if it goes to print and I discover that I missed a single space someplace. If a finished document should have larger spaces than are automatically generated by your typesetting engine and your font, then change your font, change your engine or change your stylesheet. If you're a coder you don't tolerate useless functions wasting cycles and space. I won't tolerate your extraneous spaces.
I don't use a capital letter for certain technical words (even when they start a sentence), making it both harder to programmatically detect a new sentence and more important to do so.
Just reword your sentence to not start with those words. I dare you to throw a sentence at me that cannot be rewritten to start with a different word yet convey the same meaning.
I've heard this saying for years. Yes, when I learned to type on a computer, then teacher taught us two spaces, but she probably learned on a typewriter. Modern font kerning does not require two spaces for the first letter after a period to look right. Two spaces on a typewriter made sense. On a computer, it's completely wasted space. I am glad to see modern devices (iPhone/iPad, etc) all insert a period if you double space. Hopefully that'll fix the problem.
Ugh. I hate stuff like this. Style guides be damned. Read a book, any book from now going back until X... suddenly in 2010 we feel the need to use less whitespace.... no.
WTF is the reason for 2? Your eyes so poor you cant see the delineation?
They are, you insensitive clod. Besides, when I'm reading I'd rather spend my effort on comprehension and reflection, rather than trying to puzzle over where a sentence ends. Sure I can do it, but why would you make me? If we can make that easier for people with 2 spaces instead of one, why wouldn't we? To save disk space? Why not just convert the colons to semicolons to make up the storage cost?
I am not a crackpot.
Not only that, they're so bad I can't even see the apostrophe in your sentence.
One of the many deficiencies of HTML.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Three is the number of the counting, and the counting of the number shall be three.
I am a rebel, I use python and three space tabs; the 'preferred' four spaces just takes up too much space and doesn't add anything for me (or my fellow programmers).
how will my word processor know the difference between an abbr. and the end of a sentence (so it can stretch the sentence for me)? I don't use a capital letter for certain technical words (even when they start a sentence), making it both harder to programmatically detect a new sentence and more important to do so.
It's easy if you don't use abbreviations in a sentence, or don't use "." to indicate an abbreviation in a sentence.
Perhaps it makes more sense to use two spaces after an abbreviation; it uses less paper, has less a systemic impact.
As abbreviations are so rarely used... formatting of an abbreviation should not be as much an issue as formatting of normal sentences.
Most typographers state that since the age of the computer, we should use one space after a sentence. I went through many websites as well as asked an old professor (typographer). Yes I know that I can't believe I wasted my time either but it was bothering me. I used to do two and now trained myself to do one. Two spaces were used because typewriters were not made with the ability to space accordingly and it was hard to read with only one space. I would agree that if you have some fonts that are very fancy or skinny, you can use two spaces to make it readable however for most common fonts, you should use one. Once you change, you will see the difference when you do two.
In bygone days some word processors would lay out thge text with correct spacing even when you typed too many or too few spaces after a full stop.
After correcting so mny word processor documents with spaces to line up indents, I firmly believe that was the correct approach.
Is this really an issue? Go outside and get some sun. Note: I used two spaces.
Actually, I recently signed a publishing deal, and the publisher rejected my initial submissions because I was typing two spaces after the sentence (as that's the way I was taught to do it in school). It was a major PITA to go back and change, too, since the book includes code samples, so I couldn't just do a "s/ / /g".
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
If you don't force justify the left and right margins, there is no worry about single space or double space between sentences. It is irrelevant.
When the "Fifteenth Edition of The Chicago Manual of Style" (the bible on grammar) came out around eight years or so ago, the authors were on WGN radio in Chicago promoting the book and taking questions. Someone called in asking this very question about one or two spaces at the end of a sentence (I wanted to call and ask the same question). The authors were very clear, one, even for mono space fonts.
If you are doing type setting, by all means use 1 spaces. But as you cut and paste your texts into different programs, you may be pasting into different default type faces. Sometimes it's proportional and sometimes it's monospaced. So why not use 2 spaces to be on the safe side? It's simple to programmatically replace 2 spaces by 1 space any way, if necessary. Let's be considerate of our readers rather than swear allegiance to a rule learnt in our youth.
>>>WTF is the reason for 2? Your eyes so poor you cant see the delineation?
Yes.
.
Slashdot strips the extra spaces, but double-spacing on MS Word makes the document easier to read. Whitespace is just as important a consideration as the actual text because it helps make the document inviting to the reader, ratherthanruneverythingtogetherinonegiantblackmass. (Yhat's how I used to program... it saved memory.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Try 's/\. / /g'. I can't think of any code that would get screwed up by that.
You could have entered tons of spaces after that period. Depending on which comment post mode you're using, it may be using standard HTML behavior, which strips out superfluous white space, including double spaces between sentences.
I don't care if you're a casual writer or developer, having the Chicago Manual of Style [15th Edition myself] on hand will teach you to become a much better typesetter in your work.
If you were taught to use the two spaces, you're likely to always use that.
I disagree. Also typing since mid 80s. Switched over to 1 space in the late 90s. Only took about a week to get used to it.
On the other argument, I prefer to tab and let the IDE figure it out, but by mutual agreement I'm replacing my tabs with 3 spaces.
On the iPad (which always capitalizes it's own name that way (also it always puts an apostrophe in "it's" even when it's wrong)) you can type two spaces INSTEAD of a period at the end of a sentence, and it turns it into a period and a single space. Best of both.
This is like asking "I don't like to spell the word 'the', can I spell it 'teh' instead?" A new sentence begins with 2 spaces after the preceding period. It's like, a rule or something.
Slow news day ??
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'mWayAheadOfTheTimes.TwoSpacesBecameOneSpace,AndFiftyYearsFromNow,OneSpaceWillBecomeNoSpaces!
Notice when you read shit on the internet it is single spaced after punctuation, and not double spaced?
That's only because HTML decided that consecutive whitespace should be compressed to a single character. I may put two spaces after full stops followed by new sentences, but I'm not going to make one of them to (try to) force it.
HTML, also by not employing indentation at the start of paragraphs by, has steered people toward double-spacing between paragraphs. Print media prefers not to waste the line between paragraphs and sticks with indentation of the first line of paragraphs. Books tend to reserve double spacing between paragraphs for a change of scene within a chapter, and if it occurs at a page break, a line with one to five asterisks, spaced, is employed, on whichever page it will fit.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
"A single character space, not two spaces, should be left after periods at the end of sentences (both manuscript and in final, published form) and after colons."
Duh, the extra whitespace helps you parse each sentence seperately.
It's much more mentally taxing to read a singlespaced block of mooshed together text. Also, typography concerns are nowadays about how to wrap text around oddly shaped illustrations in magazines and advertisements without strange gaps, not making actual text readable. The typography nerds may claim that the original standard before the advent of typewriters and modern computers is "more correct", but I rather think it's not due to objectiveness in analyzing which one is actually better.
...since they aren't supposed to be used in written texts anyway. Shortening words is nice for a note on the fridge, but nothing more.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I've given this a lot of thought over the years and I believe you can break it down into three circumstances
1) If you're using a monosaced typeface or a typewriter, use two spaces. It's the convention and I personally think it makes reading the text much easier. Of course how often does this situation arise these days? Not very.
2) With a typesetter or typesetting software a "space" has no specific length as it varies depending on the needs of the typesetter. That said some typesetters pad the space after a period and some don't. Either way it will look good and consistent. Trust your typesetter. Though if you use TeX you have your choice of which style to go with. It doesn't matter which you choose, it'll look fine.
3) If you're using a word processor it doesn't matter. Word processors produce crap for output. By using one you are stating up front that you don't care how the final product looks. By definition you are producing an informal text and as such you can use as many spaces as you want since it's not going to affect the aesthetic value or readability of the text any more than the decision to use a word processor in the first place. If you do care about how it looks and reads use typesetting software.
End of discussion.
Awesome.
Next topic: emacs or vi.
I am not a crackpot.
Spacing is a function of formatting, not content. You had both mixed together when you used a typewriter, but now that you're using a computer you should treat them as separate concerns. For basic issues such as this you also need to assume that your word processing software's behavior is correct by default. Let it do what it was designed to do.
"an epic battle is waging"
Citation missing.
I don't write too much code. In regular correspondence, however, I find myself at a lost on what to do. I was told in an Air Force writing class that I should use two spaces after every period. What actually comes out most of the time is some garbled up mess of inconsistent spacing. No wonder people have such a hard time with English. It's such a horrible and confusing language. I call for a universal language made from the ground up.
I disagree. Even with proportional fonts one space at the end of a period makes the text look crowded.
You must have a real hard time reading Slashdot, then, or any other site, because in HTML it doesn't matter if you put one space or a hundred at the end of a sentence; it's always rendered as one space.
Also, as someone who has worked in professional publishing for more than ten years, the rule is what someone stated above. It's always one space, unless you're typing in a fixed-width font. One space after a comma, one space after a period.
Breakfast served all day!
letsjustdropthespacingalltogether itdoesn'treallyaddanything whenyoulookatthehistoryofwritingspacingandpunctuationmarksarenewinventions letsgetridofthem
If you're teaching a non-English language, however, the rules are sometimes different. In France, for example, it's not uncommon to put one space before a question mark (?) or an exclamation point (!), like this: Zut alors !
I see a lot of people do that in English, too, but it's not correct.
Breakfast served all day!
If I am sending an email or a typewritten letter, I always hit spacebar twice after a period. In SMS and Twitter, I only hit it once due to the character limitations per message.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
who can honestly give a shit about such trivialities?
Right?
I mean, seriously, no body &*^&%$*^ cares.
If you do in fact care then I hope you die from a million paper cuts.
Some people have to have rule for everything and then they go around trying to force the sane people to comply with them. I wonder how such people manage to reproduce. Do they have a rule for how often to do it? How far to put it in? Use a metronome to comply with the insertion frequency rules?
This? This? is the kind of crap that the /. editors choose to post?
I'm sorry I bothered to come here today.
Stonewolf
Well.... there goes my "Excellent" karma...
If a tab is 2 spaces, and we're supposed to put 2 spaces after the end of a sentence than we can all save a keystroke by putting a tab at the end of a sentence instead. It's obviously the optimum solution.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I still insist on TYPING two spaces, though of course in many instances (as here) the second one winds up being stripped away against my will. I also insist on using doubled consonants in certain words when terminated with "-ing" and such, even though the spelling conventions seem to have changed to eliminate the exceptions (if the Mozilla spell-checker is any indication).
I don't use a capital letter for certain technical words (even when they start a sentence), making it both harder to programmatically detect a new sentence and more important to do so.
Personally, I prefer to phrase my sentences so that they don't begin with those words. I think it's technically correct to leave them uncapitalized because troff, for example, is an uncapitalized proper noun from a case-sensitive environment, but it's really jarring to non-technical readers and makes it harder to visually register the beginning of the sentence even if you're expecting it.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Shit on the internet is single-spaced because of how HTML has to handle white space, not because of deliberate choice on the part of the authors. Because markup is indented and formatted for readability, browsers have to treat white space specially, lest the text on the pages you read retain multi-level indenting from code formatting. That said, I was taught to use two spaces, but one just makes more sense to me.
The extra spaces entered in a Slashdot comment aren't stripped. HTML interpreters ignore them when displaying text, but they are available in the source code.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
If I didn't put 2 spaces after a sentence, it was a typo, not intentional.
What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular.
I learned to type circa 1982, on old manual typewriters bolted to the tables in typewriting class. We were taught the double space.
A decade or so later of heavy keyboard use, I switched to typing single spaces after sentences. It was no big deal (though honestly, I thought it would be harder).
Its two. However some pea brain anal retentive programmers have decided to override this and wrote code to remove the "extra" space. Their reasoning is probably about as sound as wanting to use LF instead of CRLF and to use YY instead of YYYY. We need to put up with them until we can fix it.
Dis sentense is moar readible naw ! Proove mee rong !
Some editors have sentence-wise motion commands (for example, M-a and M-e in Emacs). These rely on the "two spaces after a sentence-ending period" rule in order to distinguish sentence ending from abbreviations. Documents that follow the two-spaces convention are more easily editable by people who use those commands.
Personally, I also find it much easier on the eyes -- I can find sentence boundaries with minimal mental effort, which saves those cycles for something else (like, say, understanding what the document is saying :-) ).
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
Actually that ought to be: s/\([.?]\) /\1 /g
Since you don't want to lose the "." or the "?". You also need to do:
s/\([.?]["']\) /\1 /g
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Except then he'd lose the . /\. /g'
's/\.
... which MS-word doesn't let you do, BTW ...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Obviously one space. I really can't understand all the posters above me advocating two spaces. Where did that even come from??
You write a sentence, using single spaces between words and end it with a period as a sentence separator - Followed by a word separator, one space.
Before this article, I never knew *ANYONE* used double-spaces. Moreover, I trust LyX for limiting the number of spaces to 1...
As for code, 4-space indents.
^_^
I end my sentences with a newline, and then let the formatter (usually troff or a web browser these days) render it in whatever way it finds best.
Now that we are losing print and becoming web based it does not matter, the answer in HTML will always be ONE. You can put as much whitespace as you want at the end of a sentence and HTML will just convert it to one space.
Now you are welcome to add " " at the end of a line to get an extra space, but it will cost you 6 keystrokes.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
That's why when I write longer reports with embedded code, I keep the code in separate files and then put an \include{} in the main file, and let LaTeX embed it to produce the final PDF.
Dilbert RSS feed
For all of you that posted comments, no matter how many spaces you put between the period and the next word, nearly all of us will see it as one, since the default for browsers is to compress white space. Unless you all put multiple " " codes between your sentences, then they all came out as a single space to the world. So it looks like firefox, safari, chrome and IE have made that choice a non-issue for us, unless we really get our hands dirty writing HTML.
Bah, /. stop screwing with my whitespace.
Not to mention, the extra space is OF NO CONSEQUENCE.
I mean really, people, there's no reason to fight or alter an entrenched habit if it doesn't hurt anything, and the excess is automatically stripped out much of the time anyway.
Can we move on to more important things, like spelling "sepArate" properly?
Notice when you read shit on the internet
You know what else you notice when you read "shit" on the internet? Terrible grammar, poor spelling, words like "u", "r", "ur", "lol", spelling contractions like "can't" without an apostrophe, leaving hyphens out of things like "double-spaced", etc. The shit on the internet isn't exactly a bastion of good writing practice. There's no reason we should treat language and writing as it exists online as the official version of what is considered correct, especially when there are technical reasons to explain how things like whitespace get displayed by a browser.
Or maybe I'm just a douche bag, right? Sort of like how it's cool to be dumb, and all the smart people suck?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Slashdot doesn't strip the spaces, your browser's HTML parser does. <-- There's two spaces there, look at the source.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Why would you write a book with inline code samples using Microsoft Word? What benefit might that provide? In fact, I'd see it as a disadvantage/frustration, due to how it handles different characters and substitution (?, `, ', ") for non-ASCII types.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That's a trick question because those two snippets of code you posted do two different things.
Emacs.
Let the flame ware begin!
Type how you want. If you are writing something to be published and you use two spaces between sentences it is simplistically easy to do a "replace all" in your document and replace all instances of two spaces with one space.
Not an issue if you know how to use the tools you are given.
HTML, also by not employing indentation at the start of paragraphs by, has steered people toward double-spacing between paragraphs. Print media prefers not to waste the line between paragraphs and sticks with indentation of the first line of paragraphs. Books tend to reserve double spacing between paragraphs for a change of scene within a chapter, and if it occurs at a page break, a line with one to five asterisks, spaced, is employed, on whichever page it will fit.
For the last decade we've had a thing called CSS and you can indent your first lines to your heart's desire. Typesetting software for books doesn't do it unless the designer asks for it either.
Wh0 would ask such a dumb question?
I tried to switch to a single space for my editor girlfriend, but I find my 30+ years of typing impossible to shake. Fortunately she still loves me. Plus my Droid adds a period if I hit the space bar twice.
OK:
As someone who spends the day reading tremendously boring but necessary technical content any kind of visual breaks is welcome. I would love to see all information broken down into factoids. As an old fart I will probably double-space to my dying day. I do agree this is an almost pointless discussion. :)
Better:
- Reads tech content daily
- Visual Breaks are good
- Information factoids
- Double space always
- Pointless discussion
**********************
So which was easier to read? Both presented the same information. I suppose the reverse is true when I'm reading for pleasure otherwise every book would look like the cliff notes.
-Joe
Damn straight. Tab indenting is, funnily enough, accomplished with the tab character. Make it as many spaces as you want, I don't care.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
So, why does /. modify your post so that it only has one space between sentences? Did you just call CmdrTaco an insensitive clod?
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
I've done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!
I am totally flabbergasted at the apparent popularity of double spaces. Seriously. I thought everyone who learned to type after the invention of the Apple ][ learned to use one space, and I'm surprised to hear otherwise. I'm also shocked that the double space remains popular among people that learned to type on typewriters, considering almost everyone reads text exclusively in single-space format: either on the web, magazine, newspaper, or book, all of which are 100% single spaced. Anyone who claims it is easier to read with double spaces is not being truthful, because it's difficult to believe that they encounter more than a tiny sliver of double-spaced text in their daily lives.
Obviously, this is a personal preference with very little importance to it. People can, should, and will type however they damn well please. Nevertheless, having come myself to a conclusion which I think is straightforward and unassailable, it's eye opening to see so many posts from people with strong preferences for extra spaces.
You may as well not bother if you're only going to use two spaces...
<paragraph>
<sentence>
<word>The</word>
<word>only</word>
<word>way</word>
<word>to</word>
<word>fix</word>
<word>this</word>
<word>is</word>
<word>with</word>
<word>XML</sentence>
<sentence>
<word>Totally</word>
<word>human</word>
<word>readable</sentence>
</paragraph>
I use two... because that's what she said.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Sorry I got confused and thought you were responding to the tab indenting and not end of sentence spacing.
I thought the space patrol was a 1950's Saturday morning kid show!
In high school and when I first started using computers before that, I always used one space at the end of the sentence. After a while in the working world I realized that everyone I was working with used two. I have been using two for a while now.
The habit of using two spaces led me to an interesting discovery on my Blackberry a few years ago. If you enter two spaces, it will insert a period for you to end the sentence. So it seems that at least in the world of RIM, two spaces for the end of a sentence is so common that they've gone ahead and used that convention to automatically end sentences for you.
I am firmly in the 2-space crowd... but I am held there against my will. I've tried to reform several times, but I always revert when I stop actively thinking about it.
I learnt the 2-space convention at school, and several years later I realised that a word processor is not a typewriter, and therefore the double spacing is pretty pointless. But now it is too late - I just can't change. This is easily fixed with an auto-correction rule in OpenOffice and friends - but people will still have to endure my double spacing in emails. Sorry.
Oddly, though, I've noticed that when I type, if it's a space between words I use my right thumb. For the end of my sentence, I use my left one.
This is why I hate keyboards with a split space bar where one side is space and the other is backspace: I keep hitting the backspace. I'll also decide for myself which hand will type the letters B and Y, so I hate split keyboards that don't include redundant B and Y keys, one for each hand.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
There are. Two. Spaces! /Picard
I don't care if you're a casual writer or developer, having the Chicago Manual of Style [15th Edition myself] on hand will teach you to become a much better typesetter in your work.
And Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style will make you an even better typesetter than that.
"What does the Slashdot community think?"
Ah, groupmind. Finally, he/she/we/us/it am evolving into a unitary consciousness.
We think it's an extremely slow news day, and the editor-lobe of our groupbrain has either become extremely lax in their/our selectivity, or they/we are being pulling our collective leg.
If you're writing for someone, write the way they want or expect. Articles for journals or other public media should be written according to authors' guidelines.
If you're writing for yourself, who gives a least significant bit about formatting?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Around 22 years ago, I found a neat little program in a magazine to increase the DOS type-ahead buffer. It had to be typed into a text file, then fed to DEBUG to create a .com file. At the time, I had a secretary who kept asking for things to do, so I gave her the page to type in. She did, but it didn't work. I checked for capital Ohs instead of zeros, but it still didn't work. Then I found the lower case ls instead of 1s. Oh brother. If she'd been my mom's age, I would've not been surprised, but she was about 20 and had been using an ordinary PC keyboard for at least a couple of years.
So what happened to the program? It didn't work, even after ensuring it was typed in exactly as in the magazine.
I still keep finding documents with two spaces after periods and keep removing one. It's a life-long endeavor. 4 space indents are about right for most purposes. People I know who use 2 space indents have functions that run on for several pages and can't use 4 because then they can't see the code on the screen or paper.
I wish I had a disk drive the size of the byte count of all the second-spaces-after-periods in the world. Maybe I do. Maybe it's the one in my circa 2000 PC.
If you're not paying me to type a certain way, either FUCK OFF or do a search/replace (or both). I owe you nothing. If you are paying me, and putting only a single space is a job requirement (this has never happened), then I'll do a search/replace when I'm done typing. Then I'll look for a better job. If HTML doesn't render the spaces -- fuck it, not my problem. If you enjoy typing a single space -- I don't give a fuck what you do just like you shouldn't give a fuck what I do.
If not typing in a word processor, 2 spaces are required in order to make the text more legible. This follows for forums, HTML, text editors, comments in code, etc.
Yes, a Word Processor will space things out for you, but I, for one, will configure OO.org or Word with the '2 spaces' option. I don't like being reliant on technology to do stuff like this for me - personally, I feel that (certainly in some cases) it's dangerous. Extreme example - if a pilot always lands a plane on autopilot, then he's out of practise for when an emergency comes along.
I learned to type on a computer (a commodore 64, actually), and I learned to hit space twice. Now, when I hit a full stop (period, of you US guys), I automatically hit space twice before starting a new sentence. It's like automatically pressing the clutch before changing gears, or automatically putting the indicator on before turning the a corner - when you learn to do something, you do it automatically.
Yep, let the word processors adjust stuff automatically, but don't stop teaching the double-space. And don't stop using it either. If you get out of the habit of using it because your word processors will adjust the width of the space automatically, then you won't use it in place where this adjustment won't happen automatically.
One space should be sufficient to separate even the longest sentences. ;-)
TeX is the one true typesetting program. By default, it indents paragraphs (except for the first paragraph in a section).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
when should language evolve if not for laziness (although I tend to think of it as efficiency)
and why then do you use contractions-- you lazy bastard?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Oh wait, supersonic, that should be *BAAANG*
There. That's a completely unambiguous way to represent an abbreviation. Technical writing? There's no shortage of options for that.
There's no magic answer to the sentence spacing issue though. Use an em space if it bothers you that much. Go bitch at the Unicode consortium if that's not good enough; they've still got a few empty slots in the General Punctuation block.
This is what we do now, talk about stuff that is as pressing as this? This topic should be moved to Idle.
..., No the GOURD, no the SHOW, no the PERIOD, no the SPACE, no the DOUBLE SPACE, no the GOURD, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka9mfZbTFbk, no the PERIOD, no the SPACE, no the DOUBLE SPACE, ..., no the EGG, ...
I know I know it's a dying artform.. Not even editors can do it correctly these days.
I've been a writer (scientific articles, editing proceedings) for 15 years now. Two spaces.
Typefaces in published works are always variable-spaced, and deserve that little extra cushion. Those crazy editors always try to change it back to one.
What does the Chicago style manual say?
How come your comment only has 1 space after each sentence if you "always put 2 spaces at the end of a sentence"?
Just sayin...
42
I used to be a two-spacer for the longest time because that's what my high school typing classes taught me. Guess what's made me switch to one space? Twitter. Every character in a tweet is very precious. I couldn't spare that extra space. For consistency's sake, I've carried over one-spacing to all my other writing. And the abbreviation problem? Simple. I don't use periods for them. I've been doing that long before Twitter came around. I guess I've always found periods after abbreviations redundant. "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die." Everyone knows Mr is short for Mister there. So I don't bother with the period.
The first thing I do when I edit an article or manuscript is run a find/replace to find 2 spaces and replace with 1. Same as every other editor. So your spaces are all wasted work.
In the past it was correct to use 2 spaces when typing fixed-width type, and it was wrong when typing proportional type. Today, 2 spaces is always wrong because we don't use typewriters. Today, you just write semantically, not for presentation, because we have infinite varieties of presentation, your writing will certainly not always be published in fixed-width type. In other words, put in good data (a complete sentence followed by a space and then another complete sentence) and leave out bad data (extra spaces.)
> typewriter
There is your problem. Note that the year starts with a "2". There are these things called computers. They are garbage-in-garbage-out. 2 spaces after a sentence is garbage that someone will have to clean up.
I was a Journalism major in college, and I know they still teach you to use two spaces. I would agree, I think it makes for more reable and pleasant looking text.
Read the rest of the comments to my comment: I put 2 spaces, but HTML renders it as 1. Not my fault!
What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular.
Perhaps because QUERTY keyboards are designed to make your keystrokes alternate between left and right hands, the period is always typed by the right hand and the following space is typed by the left hand. I have no explanation for your "between words" right thumb behavior. *shrug*
One space after punctuation. (DIN is Deutsches Institut für Normung, German Institute for Standardization)
Typing two spaces at the end of each sentence makes exactly as much sense as adding low-level printer control characters to the end of every line in a text file.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
As far as efficiency is concerned -WTF- people have a data density that they want in their communications, as the extra space allows for some time to comprehend the data, assuming that the reader is maintaining a pace.
The heck with one vs. two spaces. One vs. two 'o's, now that's a battle. Last I checked, two was winning.
------
echo "Be ye in this world, but not of this world." | sed s/world/shit/g
This debate has raged for a while.
Typing and typesetting are different things. I believe you should type two spaces into source material to avoid throwing away valuable information. Your formatting software should adjust the amount of space depending on your reading preference.
I was taught in Roman Catholic High School in 1976 that it was two spaces. Until the Holy See says otherwise, I'm not going to risk my immortal soul by committing sloth and using only one.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
... At least since 2003.
That is all.
Full justification looks like crap. I don't know why publishers insist on it. Particularly in newspapers with narrow columns, a short line can have its spaces stretched ridiculously.
Two spaces after a period that ends a sentence.
Otherwise, Dr. Ms. Mrs. Mme. Mr. Mlle. etc. eng. fr. and all those other abbreviations look like they end a sentence.
Tab, of course, is ASCII 9, not "n * 0x20", where n==some value between 1 and whatever. Look at python code, where leading white space counts - mixing tabs with spaces is dumb.
no way! the only correct way is of course
If (foo=true) {
a=x;
}
*g*
1 space between sentences on Twitter and SMS, and probably any other highly space constrained mode.
2 everywhere else, as it should be.
> ...become a much better typesetter...
I'm not interested in becoming a typesetter at all. That's Knuth's job.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Excellent point.
Practically all the points argued above (legibility, typewriter convention, HTML rendering, etc.) are covered in the linked article. But unlike Slashdot, Wikipedia has references to typographical manuals, style guides, modern practices, and scientific studies. For example, several studies have been done about the supposed legibility of double-spacing, but they showed that assertion to be false.
I agree with the original poster. I've been convinced to try single-spacing from now on. It'll be interesting... in typing this comment, my muscles are double-spacing every time.
By the way, for code, it's tabs, not spaces. Tabular information -- which is information where regularly-spaced columns designates relationships in the data -- is what the tab is there for. No matter what editor you use, a single TAB keystroke will mean "go one level deeper", and a subsequent backspace will mean "go one level up". For legibility, use whatever size setting you want (4 spaces is my personal favorite).
Hear that, Guido? TABS, NOT SPACES.
By that definition, I should be unable to type properly on an American keyboard layout, because the keys aren't in the same location as they are on a Danish one, which is what I was taught on and use almost exclusively (and have for close to 20 years).
However, if I were to change the keyboard layout to American, sure, I'd stumble a few times as I get used to the awkward location of ;:-_?()/\' etc., but usually it only takes me about two minutes to get used to it.
Put me on a German layout, and I'll find other issues, as Z and Y are swapped amongst other things, but again, it really doesn't take all that long to get right.
Or for a completely different perspective. Languages. Danish and English are only slightly related (both being Germanic languages), which means that you have different rules for grammar and sentence structure. So how come people like me can somehow speak multiple languages, when it's apparently impossible for people like you to stop using two spaces at the end of a sentence?
Are those kinds of people possibly the same people who use for an apostrophe instead of ', even when you show them that they're actually going to use even fewer keystrokes to achieve their goal AND it will make them look like less of an idiot in the process?
Efficiency has nothing to do with it.
The reason you add two spaces is because the additional space aids your eyes in determining individual sentences. Two spaces gives the eyes an additional visual cue, and thus is far easier to parse.
Please explain why you used one space between all sentences in your post.
Agreed. Use one space, and let the software figure things out. (La)TeX has been doing this for decades:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing
Similarly with indentation with codes. Insert a character, and let the software figure out how to visually portray it (perhaps the project has a code style guide like FreeBSD's style(9)). I've heard of places that do a pre-commit run through lint(1) before allowing check-ins to enforce consistency.
My understanding was that an em space (a space the width of the lowercase letter m) was the usual typographical approach, but that this could conveniently be approximated by two spaces.
Nonaggression works!
Thats okay, you'll get it right one day. We'll wait for you to catch up.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm all for passionately taking a position in a debate that doesn't really warrant a debate. Like "pop" vs. "coke" vs. "soda". (it's "pop" you vile heritics!). It's a joke though. The entire root cause of the battle is trivial and meaningless. The entire thing is a satirical play on a minor regional linguistic nuance. I do it for a laugh.
And so as to the question upon the numberings of the spaces between sentences, verily I say unto thee: Who gives a damn?
If you really passionately care about such a minor thing as this, then you are an anal nit-picker. Now piss off and do something awesome.
whoneedsspaces?orcapitals?orparagraphs?rvwls?
Spaces aid the eye. Capitals are an additional aid.
Without spaces and paragraphs, the mind fatigues and you start to skip parts of what is being read. Vowels just are syntactic sugar, and I love them.
One of the many deficiencies of HTML.
Perhaps. I'm in the habit of putting an after periods when I write for HTML. Problem would be solved, if it wasn't for comment editing code that strips them out (such as here on Slashdot which you can see here since I put 4 nbsp's separated by spaces after the periods in this paragraph, and despite the fact they are preserved through the preview, they are having no visible effect). The deficiency is not strictly with HTML, but with some of the editors that work with it.
Though I agree that HTML does not make it easy to maintain double spaced sentence separation. I hate reading single-spaced sentence text, I always notice it and it looks ugly. Perhaps I should insert
after every sentence, and while that would look ugly too, at least it would show my displeasure with the sentence police who have apparently decided that we will not use two spaces...
One traditional, one more recent.
1) From the "typewriter age" that was always the standard;
2) If you want to parse data in prose using a program it is much easier to parse it a sentence at a time, and with ". " as a sentence delimiter and ". " for some other kind of period (e.g., abbreviations), it makes things much easier.
A purist also puts two spaces after colons and semicolons within sentences.
Wait, make that three reasons:
3) If you REALLY prefer a single space after a period at the end of a sentence, then doing a search-and-replace on ". " to transform it into ". " is trivial, and then everybody is happy. Likewise if you want to do it typographically correctly or something fancy, and use a "long space" or some other specially-tuned whitespace character at the end of the sentence rather than "plain" spaces to make it "proper". Good luck trying to do it the other way around.
For ordinary text I'll use two, thanks.
Nonononono. NO. The proper way is 3 spaces. period.
Yes, but Slashdot DOES strip . <- there's 4 's separated by spaces after the period, or at least were when I entered it-- and they are preserved in the edit box through the preview, but do not show up in the rendered version...
History Major that works as a systems engineer now. The average developer/QA/engineer's email grammar is atrocious at the places I have worked... i often end up sending out emails that speak for others which makes me look good to the execs. Btw, I still keep a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style from HIST 301 on my desk. :)
There are two spaces between each sentence. Period. You want more space between sentences than between words, so that it is easier to parse. Don't give me garbage that this is done automatically; programs have trouble doing this automatically because they can't tell the difference between the period at the end of a sentence ("Jack jumped.") and the end of an abbreviation ("Dr. Williams jumped."). Especially when abbreviations can occur at the end of a sentence (!). There are other ways to do it, but they're all far more painful and tend to get lost when data gets transferred.
Yes, HTML loses this if you don't use non-breaking spaces, but that's irrelevant. HTML is not the be-all of typography, it loses LOTS of typographical information. If typography is critical to you, you need to use formats like OpenDocument format (editable) or PDF (practically read-only).
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
In the old typewriter days correspondence used two spaces after the end-of-sentence punctuation mark. Newspaper and magazines, which contain a lot of text and are printed on paper that is a cost to the business, switched to one space. Put a dozen typographers and designers in a room and you'll get two dozen opinions. On the other hand, all language "rules" are arbitrary and you can do whatever you want. Now everyone shut up and argue about macs vs. PCs.
I've personally come across text from people with a single space between sentences and had a hard time with sentence separation. Of course, I also can't stand when people use shorthand and ignore capitalization and punctuation.
When you use BlackBerry shortcuts how do you automatically type a period at the end of a sentence? Press space twice after the last word.
More importantly, but not necessarily related, where do you stand on the use of commas in a list? I firmly believe there should be one before the "and" of the second to last entry. i.e. One, two, three, and four. This is not the popular way to do it but is considered acceptable. This prevents confusion where a list item contains the word "and" as part of the item. For instance, take this list: Barnes and Noble, Proctor and Gamble, Campbell's and Hunts. Done the accepted way the last two items can be read as one group instead of separate entities. You have to reread it to realize the lack of an "and" before Campbell's makes them separate items.
In a proportionally spaced typeface, the period already has adequate space after it. I think the double space is excessive, unnecessary and looks ugly.
But old habits die hard. So after I finish writing something, I do a search-replace to fix all the double spaces that my fingers insist on inserting regardless.
Actually, I like that reason - makes sense, my right hand is "busy" with the period, so my left hand steps up. I'm a righty by default, so maybe that's why my right hand handles between words - just force of habit to default right first? Thanks Rainmayun!
What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular.
If you are using a modern Word processor, it doesn't matter. Write how you want. However, if you typed using two spaces at the end of a sentence, it is a simple matter to find and replace all two spaces with one space. It is not so simple to change a one space to two.
If the submission guide to the publication says two spaces, then use two spaces. If it says one space, use only one space. Remember find and replace is your friend. You can follow the same policy as above for whether or not to use curly quotes or straight quotes too. Find and replace renders the argument moot.
Me too. Been double spacing since the 70's. I'd sooner give up scotch and smoking!
Would Semitic markup just be filled with lots of and and the like?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
You can always use non-breaking spaces if you insist.
In addition, I worked at one of the biggest printing firms in the world and our typesetting system also stripped out extra spaces, on purpose.
How do you know you've been doing it for the last 20 years if you just noticed 6 months ago?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Notice when you read shit on the internet it is single spaced after punctuation, and not double spaced?
HTML, also by not employing indentation at the start of paragraphs by, has steered people toward double-spacing between paragraphs. Print media prefers not to waste the line between paragraphs and sticks with indentation of the first line of paragraphs.
Never mind HTML (i.e. web developers), textarea input boxes even to this day don't allow you to type tabs, the tab key just jumps you to the next form element. This means that ever since webmail became available, everyone had to double-space their paragraphs.
Notice the default Word 2007 style also adds a space between paragraphs. I usually switch a new document's style back to Word 2003 to get rid of it.
Whyuseanyspacesatall?Thinkofthepaper/bitswecouldsave!
Even if you start with the presumption that two spaces after a sentence is obsolete, that doesn't necessarily mean that people who are habituated to it need to drop it. qwerty is obsolete but people still use it. We all know it was designed to facilitate imperfect typewriter technology. What percentage of you are typing in dvorak right now, be honest? We use it because we know it. It comes easily now that we've learned it so well. While we're at it, how many of you fellow Americans are using the metric system by default in your everyday lives? Why not? This isn't an argument about who's right or wrong. It's really just about who cares enough to inconvenience themselves to do things properly. If we really cared about stuff like this we ought to all have better penmanship too.
Look up what the rules for identifying sentence boundaries in Unicode are, and write your text so that your sentences can be distinguished by applying these rules.
Unicode is THE standard for dealing with natural text, so that's what you should follow.
Which can be fixed with this CSS:
p + p { margin-top: -1em; text-indent: 1em; }
I create technical documents and training materials for a large software development company. I use two spaces between sentences. I think it looks better. Style guides seem to be split on the subject so there won't be any kind of definitive answer. Just go with whatever you're most comfortable with.
This is why when I parse text into HTML I do a replace of space-space with -space.
I was always taught indent the paragraphs (4 spaces, or 8 if tabbing on a computer), two spaces between sentences, one blank line between paragraphs.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
It's called proportional fonts, and they have been standard on computers for decades. Use MS Word or some other font-aware piece of software to print this comment out and measure the spacing between words within this sentence, and then the spacing between this sentence and the preceding period. It's not a full two spaces, but you don't need a full two spaces to make the visual distinction to which you're referring.
If you're working in constant width fonts, you should still add an extra space between sentences.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I looked at the wiki article, and was flabbergasted by the amount of detail in it I looked at the history just to see if this was all created as a joke in the last 24 hours.
Nope - this has entries going back to 2006.
And to think they deleted my article on the various types of toejam as crossreferenced by nationality, region, and sock fibers as 'irrelevant' - Sheesh.
{G} - Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
... I can live with one, as long as it's an em space.
Looks like you should use ... a superscript number enclosed in brackets :O
At least that is what i got out of that link. (=== Most of what i type gets the spaces sucked out by the computer anyways.... and some seem to suck out anything useful for readibility ;)
Using two spaces between sentences was a workaround for the limitations of typesetting on typewriters, which couldn't easily adjust horizontal spacing. It's a substitute, much as using two hyphens to represent an em-dash, three periods to represent an ellipsis, underlining to represent italics, or straight quotes to represent curled quotes, are all workarounds for the limitations of typewriters.
Modern word processors detect and fix these things automatically.
We hear copy editors, but more often typesetters whining about the two spaces contributing to the vertical river thing. Look. If you want the reader to logically follow your argument on the page and you respect your own thought process enough to trust the reader to come back and reread your sentences, then use the the two spaces. Individual sentences are easier to find that way. If all you care about is achieving a uniformly gray page, then try the single space.
I can still picture the side of the page (left or right) and approximate position on the page of passages of text I read as an undergraduate in certain books. I looked up just now two such passages I could think of and still have the books and both were from books with extra space between sentences. The pages of such books have distinct features. If all pages just look evenly gray memory is destroyed or not created to begin with in the reader. Either way two spaces is better.
The issue at hand has been with us for a very long time, but at the core it has nothing to do with keyboards or quantities of "spaces." It has to do with the display of symbols on printed pages. And in particular the failure to adequately include display information into the logical encoding of the symbols as distinct from their appearance on a page.
If we are just looking at words on a page, the question might be simply, should the white space between words be equal to the white space between sentences? If both sentences and words are demarcated only by space, then the answer must be no, for some method is needed to distinguish the logical structure of a sentence from a mere grouping of words. Given that we have additional sentence ending symbols, the answer should be effortless, but the symbols are vague. Ages ago, someone fucked up and used a period to indicate an abbreviated series of characters. Because of this, the character series period-space cannot sufficiently mark the logical ending of a sentence.
To restate the original question: "What character (or series of characters) is correctly used to indicate the end of a sentence structure within a series of symbols?" The correct answer is, and must by necessity always be, "The end-of-sentence-character(s)." Unfortunately we are confronted with an Adamsian Total Existence Failure with respect to such a standard.
Should the white space between an abbreviation ending in a period and the following word be equal to the white space between the end of a sentence and the following sentence? I think the answer is clearly no. Why would they be? The ending of a sentence indicates the end of a logical construct. The ending of an abbreviation is something wholly of a different character. If you must choose between ending a sentence in one or two spaces, use two.
The one space/two space debate is really about fundamentals of good typhography when doing text layout. It has everything to do with the overall colour of the block of text you're setting. But I'm no expert. Bill Hill is. He knows more about fonts and typography than likely anyone posting in this quite silly thread, including me. He spoke at length about spaces after periods on Channel 9 back in 2004.
Want to read more? Then pick up a copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. It's pretty much the bible of typography and goes into all sorts of wonderful detail on the colour of text, how to lay out pages, when to use em dash vs. en dash vs. hyphen, lowercase numbers, etc. And yes, Mr Bringhurst even talks about spacing after periods.
Amen. I carry it even further with a general cleanup macro: eliminate all double spaces, double returns, multiple tabs; fix common keyboard limitations like "space hyphen space" to em dash, and "digit hyphen digit" to "digit en dash digit"; convert ' and " symbols to proper apostrophe and typographic quotes; ...
I don't really care how a manuscript arrives. When it leaves my hands, it will meet whatever standards I'm being paid to follow. And to date, after >20 years of preparing content, I've never been asked to make the final result look like a typed manuscript.
The whole point of two spaces is that it is easier to read. The "more standard" is in fact two spaces. Single spacing is a relatively new thing. You've pretty much managed to get everything wrong here. Congrats!
One space, of course. With the advent of Fonts That Don't Suck(tm), the additional space is not necessary. So I save 'em.
Old dogs should learn new tricks. I'm old too. Double space was always lame. It's what christmas users would do in the bbs days.
Check out cnn, fox, msnbc, boing, consumerist, the times, etc. Now check out the BBC, slayradio, or other english sites outside of the US. SINGLE_FUCKEN_SPACED after all punctuation.
I can forgive bad grammar, crappy spelling, 3133 $p34k, u/r/ur/yer/lol and other chat speak, but double spacing makes me want to slap someones fro and scream "SINGLE SPACE YOU FUCKEN NOOB".
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onetwospaces.htm
The pro's use single space, and you should too.
Way back... in the bbs days... guess what? EVERYONE FUCKEN SINGLE SPACED.
The subject line may say it all, but it bears repeating: why isn't this a poll?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Actually the paragraph is relatively new. Socrates and such didn't write in paragraphs, an occasional pi was used to denote a change in subject.
Icanreadthatjustfine. Isuggestweabolishspacesaltogether. Allwithmesayyay.
Haven't you been keep up with the news? Chelsea got MARRIED!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
.. we have no spaces you insensitive clod!
Somewhere in the miasma of bandwidth-wasting childish prattle, someone might have answered this, but I'll go anyway.
Back in the day when print press type was set by hand, it was difficult to keep track of certain things--partly because the type was set backward. It was, for instance, difficult to distinguish between "p" an "q" when viewed backward, hence the phrase, Mind your p's and q's.
Likewise, it was difficult to discern the beginning and end of sentences, further compounded by limited font availability. Editors, too, who spent/spend all day reading/correcting manuscripts found them difficult to read after a while, so easy-to-read manuscripts received preferential treatment. Thus, doubles-spaced sentences and paragraphs became the standard.
Today, with desktop publishing and automatic text justification, extra spaces are unnecessary and actually counter productive. So, if banging out something on a typewriter, two spaces. In a word processor, one space.
(Full disclosure: I am the editor of a print magazine as well as a book author.)
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
You don't capitalise words even at the start of a sentence, but are asking advice on spacing between sentences?
Get real.
Well my advice is why don't you fix obvious relevant problems, before fixing irrelevant ones.
In Python, where indentation matters, tabs are evil
Yes, and people who indent with Tabs should be shot! Or maybe they should just get a text editor. ;)
Actually what is evil is mixing tabs and spaces in the same code. So evil in fact that python has a command the command line switch -t to warn of such evil, and -tt to raise. The style guide suggests only spaces, and 4 per indent. IDLE on the other hand uses only tabs.
I was being a little ironic about the text editor. I use vi (or vim actually), and it has the nasty nasty habit of mixing both under certain circumstances. For instance if you set the shiftwidth to the standard 4 it will use spaces for one indent and a tab for two. Arghh!!! %| In vim at least you can set expandtab on to nuke all tabs entered. In oldschool vi you have to rely on a more hackish solution (eg. tabstop=10000)
While I'm on the subject, I can't believe it when I see vi users hitting [Tab] to indent and [BS] to dedent. It's ^T and ^D in insert mode, and >> << in command mode guys!
So the moral is: use whichever you want, spaces or tabs, but use them consistently (ie. exclusively)!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Unless you are sending a txtmsg and each character costs you something.
Double tap. Always.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
for ^%^&**% sake....get a life you lot!!!!.....there are more important things to worry about than how many spaces after a period. My mind boggles....
I make use of style sheets as much as possible. This allows for example, either block or first-line indent. With a style-sheet set down to character-level, one can use single or double-spaces freely at the end of a sentence. The markup language I wrote (KML, see, eg http://www.os2fan2.com/ makes use of a chacter-level style sheet that replaces eg `t and `T by th,TH or , respectively, eg 'the polygloss' vs 'the polygloss as nature intended', both derive from the same source KML file.
One uses also two kinds of paragraph (p) and (pp), to create leading vs following paragraph. The pp-style paragraph can have either first-line indent (traditional) vs blank-line block style.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
From the Wikipedia article: .....Double spacing, or placing two spaces between sentences (sometimes referred to as English spacing)......."
"This was French spacing—a term synonymous with single space sentence spacing
Given free choice, I can tell you this: I would sooner have my danglies ripped off and fed to the dogs than adopt another French system.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
Two spaces is definitely correct.It makes a visual distinction that the brain trains in on.An alternative to the horrible trick, which fails when it falls at the end of a right-aligned line, is Unicode's wide range of spaces.
To be. Or not to be. That is the question.
To be.Or not to be.That is the question.
(It seems typical of Slashdot's decline that it fails to render ߓ correctly. Nerds would care about such things.)
Slashdot doesn't, your web browser does. http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#idx-white_space-2
This is why we have and <pre>
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
I hit the space bar twice in vim and then trust LaTeX (or the browser, or whatever's responsible for the actual rendering) to Do The Right Thing.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
I've been in front of a keyboard for the last 20 years (thankfully not the entire 20 years - I get up to use the bathroom every now and then), but never noticed what my thumbs were doing when I hit the spacebar - I just hit the spacebar. Someone else actually noticed me doing it & wondered why, and I've been wondering ever since. Could be something I've only started doing recently, but suspect it's how I've typed all along & just never realized.
What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular.
Check out cnn, fox, msnbc, boing, consumerist, the times, etc. Now check out the BBC, slayradio, or other english sites outside of the US. SINGLE_FUCKEN_SPACED after all punctuation.
Actually, BBC appears quite fond of separating sentences with a line break. Other than that, web browsers render 2 spaces as 1 space. Even if they hit the space bar twice, it's still going to display in the browser as a single space. The only place online you would see two spaces in a row is if they used a non-breaking space character or if the text is in a preformatted tag.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
That should read:
set listchars=eol:$,trail:-,tab:>-,extends:>,precedes:
Sorry.
Gah... Slashdot eats "HTML tags", i.e. the left angle bracket after "precedes:" and the left angle bracket F2 right angle bracket is removed.
This being Slashdot, you are neither warned about this fact nor are you sent into preview mode automagically.
The full, non-Slashdot-garbled, code can be found at http://paste.debian.net/82317/
Nice rant, but I use a tabwidth of four. I might lose some screen real estate, but you can still read my manually broken lines if you set your editor to two.
I counter your implicit assumption that catering to deep nesting with a tabwidth of two with my tendency to factor out code blocks.
Finally, while I agree that a textwidth of 80 is nice for code (and 72 for emails), that practice seems to be changing due to wider and wider screens. Similar to how computers did away with the need for fixed-width tabs ;)
We need to stick with two spaces so that our children and our children's children will learn how to properly type, so that when a coronal mass ejection or an Iranian EMP comes along and destroys all the fancy computer machines, everyone will be able to jump right in to using them old mechanical typewriters again.
It appears that the nature of HTML enforces the single space model. Pll should save their keystrokes and single space.
Two spaces between sentences or GTFO.
The other day I took a civil service test for a clerical position (because many people don't seem to agree that the recession's over) and on the typing speed section (70 wpm means I actually did learn something useful in high school) there was a clear instruction to use two spaces at the end of a sentence. There was also references in the text I was typing to fax machines being "productivity enhancing," which (besides slowing down my wpm considerably as a good typist would hyphenate that phrase or the twenty like it in the text) led me to wonder how long ago the test was designed (so did the questions on the test about typewriters, which the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania apparently still issues its employees).
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/: You should use two spaces after a sentence-ending period. When writing English, Strunk and White apply.
Next question, please.
I used to properly put 2 spaces after every sentence... but the need to conserve space (literally) in 140 or 240 character posts (Twitter/Facebook, respectively), have kinda started breaking me of that habit. Luckily I don't really use Twitter *that* much and usually only post links on FB, so... thanks to Slashdot and my getting more into forum posting elsewhere (as I'm finally reaching that point in my career/age/wisdom level where I can actually answer some people's questions, heh. And I'm becoming a grouchy, opinionated old man), I do get some practice in double-spacing after periods. As I have always believed it should be.
ad astra per alia porci
it's about what happens between the end of a sentence and the beginning of the next sentence, aka "sentence spacing".
And yes, the answer is "Because that would make it harder to read". Try it.