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?"
I think this is the joke.
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
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.)
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."
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.
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."
Not really fringe cases, and requires a bit of effort, unless one uses \frenchspacing (which is not the default) so one _will_ need to think about it, since TeX by default adds more space after a period, so one must indicate which periods do not require additional spacing, e.g.:
Dr.\ Knuth was very concerned with the typography of his published articles and books. This resulted in his development of \TeX\ when early systems for page composition were unable to match the old styles. While it handles many things automatically, it does require a certain attention in the preparation of the text, i.e.\ indicating normal width spaces by preceding them with a backslash.
\vfill\eject\bye
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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?
ASCII when there was just ASCII had a tab character which was commonly interpreted as "tab to the next multiple of 8 column". If you were in column 4, a tab would not look like 8 spaces, it would look like 4 spaces.
On the keypunch I used, TAB meant "advance to the next tab column as indicated on your drum card." For FORTRAN, that meant the first tab skipped to column 2 (line number), the next tab to column 6 (continuation), the next to 7, a few every four spaces, and then off to column 72 (card number).
Every reasonable typewriter I used had tab stop settings so you could define what columns a tab took you to.
If your envirenment or prefers a different standard, either adopt it or be prepared to cause problems.
Thus was created "indent", which converts code from all those other people's atrocious formatting styles into your preferred on and back.
That was the reason in the days of typewriters. And it continues to be the reason if you are writing in a text editor using a monospaced font. But a word processor will space a document properly, such that the space between sentences IS wider than a space between words.
because HTML is broken. There is two spaces after the preceding period but you can not see them.Now you can because I used tags. (no you can't because /. is broken and does not render the tag properly...)
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The way around this is to _indent_ with tabs and _align_ with spaces.
God forbid I line up some stuff to make it more readable.
You can do both: use tabs for indentation, and spaces to line things up.
So, if you have a statement like this:
printf("testing 1 2 3 %d %s",
var1, var2);
the printf would have a tab, and that's it. On the second line, there would be one tab (to match the line above it), and then the rest would be filled in with spaces, like this: (underscore indicates a space)
printf("testing 1 2 3 %3 %s",
________var1, var2);
That way, you can set your tab stop to whatever you want (2, 4, 8, 3, 5, 16, whatever), and it will look correct.