How many spaces after a period?

Is this an American thing? Come to think of it, my ex-boss, who was American, used to do this all the time.

I'd never even heard of using two spaces (or the justification for it) before this thread

i am sure we have done this thread before.

i did two-spaces in school, and it was very satisfying to double-tap the space bar, but as it is wrong with variable-width fonts i trained myself out of it. One of the ways I recognised that it was wrong was that I noticed that html automatically stripped out the extra space. the other day i had to proof-read something for my momz and you could tell the bits i'd written apart from hers by my lack of extra space - she later went through and painstakingly added the extra space in, and then her editor went through and stripped all of the extra spaces out.

we did this back in real ilx. i think at the time i voted for 2, because i'd been taught that. nowadays i'm strictly a one space soldier

nowadays, don't word processors force an em space after a full stop? that is what i like best bcz i was brought up by a copy of Hart's Rules.

Using two for fixed-width type seems even weirder than for variable-width, to my eyes - it's already open and spacey enough as it is.

iow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzgGTTtR0kc

YE-YEEAH-AAH

I was raised on two in typing class and stuff, but I definitely got into an argument about this on irl-ilx before and was shamed into changing my ways.

But then again, maybe it's just an ilx thing like hating cargo shorts or flip-flops.

I was taught 2 as well. In fact I only found out that was wrong the first time ILX did this thread. I don't really know why it's such a big deal though.

i was raised on 2 and it just makes sense to me. i like a bit of a breath after a sentence. i don't really care to retrain myself at this point in time.

― surm, Friday, 16 December 2011 01:53 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

^^^

you know what is a hard thing to do, having to write brochure copy or some other text per the house style of just one space. you end up going back & deleting accidental doubles.

feel like everyone who's arguing that it just ~is~ one, naturally, is revealing their lack of imagination and basic inability to find or imbue their life with some small occasional joy

fuck an extra space

One 1 One 1 One 1

Double spacing after a period makes me IA and I can't help but feel people who do this are disgusting savages. I had to create a macro to automatically rid all articles I get at the paper here, and letters and such, to edit those mofo's out. What a world we live in...

feel like everyone who's arguing that it's 2 because they have a sentimental attachment to it needs to have a good hard think about mystification and false consciousness.

otm. otm. otm.

ONE YOU SILLY PEOPLE!

OK, so for all you number twos. Do you think 2 spaces really look better? They're sick. Sick and wrong.

 ooh

       my

I mean, once you read an explanation of why one space is better than two, it's pretty difficult to continue typing 2 spaces and live with yourself

― silverfish, Friday, December 16, 2011 12:25 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

Wait so what's the argument other than it's no longer necessary?

the Zog media has brainwashed them into believing the lie!

what the hell is this? ONE ffs

(gets gun)

I try to use at least 5 spaces after a period.

gonna switch to 2 spaces cos judging by this thread, 1 space means you might be a tool.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/4/22/1303500585862/Osama-bin-Laden-008.jpg

1 space is like science and seriousness, 2 spaces is like hey read this fun thing

don't be a twool

voted 1

I got an email the other day from someone who put one space BEFORE every fullstop and no spaces afterwards. BONKERS.

^ not how I remember Chuck D's lyric

america is the only place where more than like a dozen people use two spaces afaict.

it's a place with vast unpopulated areas, so no shortage of space to go round.

silby, the space after a fullstop in TeX w/o frenchspacing is not the same amount of space it puts between words within a sentence, but it's pretty much always less than two spaces (unless you're putting long words in narrow columns, in which case you are a savage). i'm white btw.

america is the only place where more than like a dozen people use two spaces afaict.

This could be the case... I'm not super young, I've lived during the age of typewriters, and I've still never heard anything about a two space rule having been used here in Finland.

i skirt around the problem by just never ending my

I was taught two in UK secondary school, and that was just a little over ten years ago! I quickly distanced myself from that savagery, though.

One thing I've heard of being taught in school's lately is to have one space BEFORE a comma. wtf is that?

WHAT? NO. That is not happening.

Any school where that's going on should be burned to the ground.

o crap i pluralised with an apostrophe, they've gotten to me too.

I want to start a poll on how people pluralize/use the possessive w/ nouns that end in s

One thing I've heard of being taught in school's lately is to have one space BEFORE a comma. wtf is that?

this has to be a mistake, why teach something that is no way used anywhere else in the entire galaxy

To make the Klingons think they are travelling backwards.

That is horrifying. How many spaces after a period is not something I care much about, but putting a space before a comma is MADNESS.

I want to start a poll on how people pluralize/use the possessive w/ nouns that end in s

My last name ends in -ss and I am a staunch advocate of 's because then I get -ss's. I want all the sss!

kisses

asses

successes

assesses

I never could decide
So I just stopped using punctuation
And pressing return instead

6/10/7

Wait so what's the argument other than it's no longer necessary?

― ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ (~curious orange~), Friday, December 16, 2011 12:07 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

what it is is:

in typesetting, after a full stop (a full stop that ends a sentence - this does not apply to e.g. the full stops in e.g.) you have a slightly longer space than usual - an em-space. When the typewriter came in, using fixed-width type (i.e. type in which every character is one em wide), people evoked the longer-than-a-usual-space aspect of an em-space by using two spaces rather than one, the same way that people sometimes mimic an em-dash by using a double dash thus: --.

Using a variable-fixed font, the full stop crowds close to the word it follows, giving the impression that there is an em-space following the sentence-final full stop. Some word processors may even impose an em-space after a sentence-ending full-stop in the same way that they impose a capital letter.

They are thus both approximations toward the typographical norm but at present the one-space approximation is more close an approximation.