éric 🚲 🇪🇺 Nov 27

@jbc I learned to type on mechanical typewriters back in high school [*] and we were taught to double space after the end of a sentence to aid in distinguishing from other uses of the full stop (., aka period) such as abbreviations, initials, etc. I carried this habit on to when I started using computers and Emacs simply reinforced this through its default definition of a "sentence". I continue to do this even when tooting as it's automatic even though most (not all) Mastodon tools ignore the extra space when displaying a toot.

And it does feel good, as you say! There's something about the bang-bang that feels right.

[*] arguably the most significant learning outcome from my high school years; little did I know I would be spending every day at a keyboard the rest of my life. 😮😀

#Emacs

Show threadKarl Voit  Nov 27

@ericsfraga @jbc I've read multiple times, that those rules were true for physical #typewriter setups but lost their significance with computers. Systems like LaTeX might add some extra spacing (although not twice as large) between sentences. Furthermore, some experts argue that the tiny dot at the bottom before the following space is almost as a second space at least from the psychological perspective.

In my world, the use of #doublespace is no thing at all anywhere.

Strunk and White "The Elements of Style" does not mention double spaces as far as I can see.

Robert Bringhurst "The Elements of Typographic Style" (1992) has a chapter on that: p.28 2.1.4: "Use a single word space between sentences". He argues that this is a "quaint Victorian habit" which resulted from classical latin and greek where sentences were started with lowercase letters.

HTH & YMMV

#typography #typesetting

Show threadOmikhleia - Dragon Brumeux
@publicvoit @ericsfraga @jbc The "English spacing" convention using a large space between sentence is a 18th-19th "printers' rules" mostly abandoned in modern days. Using"two spaces was only a way to emulate it with typewriter machines. (La)TeX applies English spacing by default, but calls the reverse "french spacing" -- Though the French had nothing to do with it specifically, having a regular inter-word space was the convention everywhere else outside the English-speaking world ;)
Nov 27 at 11:43amWeb
Show threadM. GrégoireNov 30

@omikhleia @publicvoit @ericsfraga @jbc
Like others in this thread, I prefer to use two spaces after a period. To make nice documents I use LaTeX, which I trust to do the right thing. I think some software uses the double space to distinguish end of sentence from abbreviations, but I don't know if that's true for LaTeX.

Here on Mastodon, double spaces have the particular advantage that if I run a bit beyond the character limit for my post, I can then delete some spaces to make it work, barely.