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'll grant you that on one condition ... if your fancy text-formatter is going to write in a consistent number of chars so that if it's rendered by another editor it still works, then fine. Otherwise, no.
A former co-worker and I got into this argument. His emacs would use a single "tab" char to display between 1 and 40 tabs because it "knew" what it meant to do, but any other editor might render it like shit since it didn't have the right number of actual chars and relied on a specific mode.
It caused huge problems with those of using different editors which didn't interpret the tabs the same way. Eventually, I locked him out of CVS until he fixed his emacs to adhere to our coding standard -- our manager agreed with me. :-P
If you mean it to be 8 levels of indent, you need 8 placeholder items. Not one which is interpreted by your *^&%* editor (and only your editor). Otherwise, you end up with vast diffs specific to whitespace, and not what was changed. The resulting document must be properly rendered in any text editor, and it must do it consistently.
But, yes. The Tab is the unit of measure, and your editor can render a tab as however many chars make you happy.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...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.
I was about to say the same thing. Because in fixed-width the period is so small, the space to the right of it in its block plus the space amounts to quite a lot of room. In proportional fonts, you don't need to worry so much.
I am accustomed to working with and thinking about text through a terminal window - as a result I always singlespace my sentences now.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Elastic tabstops (http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/) are the future.