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?"
[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.)
It's a well-known fact that God uses 3-space tabs. I don't want to go to hell, so that's what I use, but your eternal soul is your own call, buddy.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
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.
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
The linux Kernel is (was?) 8 spaces. The idea between 8 space tabs is that if your code is indented so far as to be a pain to read, then you should probably look into why it's so nested.
<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.
...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.
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.
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.
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?
Elastic tabstops (http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/) are the future.
So, in our efficient, modern world, I think there is no room for two spaces after a period. In the opinion of this particular copyeditor, this is a good thing.
Efficiency has nothing to do with it. In fact, efficiency is a complete red-herring, since presumably in our efficient, modern world we could simply write software to be intelligent enough to automatically add a space between sentences when it detects a period-space-word starting with a capital letter.
The reason you add two spaces is because the additional space aids your eyes in determining individual sentences. If you only use a single space to delineate words and sentences, all paragraphs merge into a jumble. Two spaces gives the eyes an additional visual cue, and thus is far easier to parse.
and it's from quite a credible source
An appeal to authority is less argumentatively valid than an appeal to reason. The Chicago Manual of Style gives no reason except some hand-waiving about our "efficient, modern world," which is a huge, steaming pile of bunkum.
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.