[Cialug] Nakamoto: Double Spacer

[j.bengtson at mchsi.com]

Why two spaces after a period isn't wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history)http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324
Here are some facts:
* There were earlier standards before the single-space standard, and they involved much wider spaces after sentences.* Typewriter practice actually imitated the larger spaces of the time when typewriters first came to be used.  They adopted the practice of proportional fonts into monospace fonts, rather than the other way around.* Literally centuries of typesetters and printers believed that a wider space was necessary after a period, particularly in the English-speaking world.  It was the standard since at least the time that William Caslon created the first English typeface in the early 1700s (and part of a tradition that went back further), and it was not seriously questioned among English or American typesetters until the 1920s or so.* The “standard” of one space is maybe 60 years old at the most, with some publishers retaining wider spaces as a house style well into the 1950s and even a few in the 1960s.* As for the “ugly” white space, the holes after the sentence were said to make it easier to parse sentences.  Earlier printers had advice to deal with the situations where the holes became too numerous or looked bad.* The primary reasons for the move to a single uniform space had little to do with a consensus among expert typographers concerning aesthetics.  Instead, the move was driven by publishers who wanted cheaper publications, decreasing expertise in the typesetting profession, and new technology that made it difficult (and sometimes impossible) to conform to the earlier wide-spaced standards.

----- Original Message -----
From: Jeff Chapin 
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group 
Sent: Thu, 6 Mar 2014 12:30:32 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Nakamoto: Double Spacer

>From the linked wiki article: "These include a normal word
space(as between the words in
a sentence), a single enlarged
space , two full
spaces, and, most recently in digital
media,
no space."

Does anyone have an example where the period ending a sentence does not
have a following space?It seems awkward to me to type, and I have a hard
time thinking where I would have seen that.In fact, this is not just
awkward to type, but seems ugly, and more difficult to read.

Jeff


On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Nathan Stien  wrote:

> I was born in 1981, and I was taught to double space after a period
> sometime in the early 90s, using GUI word processors.  I have never used a
> typewriter.
>
> While I know the trend has gone against double spacing, my programmer-brain
> always liked that it resolves the ambiguity between periods that are part
> of abbreviations and those that end a sentence.
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-- 
Jeff Chapin
President, CedarLug, retired
President, UNIPC, "I'll get around to it"
President, UNI Scuba Club
Senator, NISG, retired
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