Microsoft has settled the great space debate, and sided with everyone who believes one space after a period is correct, not two. The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period (a full stop for you Brits) as an error, and to offer a correction to one space. Microsoft recently started testing this change with the desktop version of Word, offering suggestions through the Editor capabilities of the app.
There’s normal spacing, and everything else. I’m glad Microsoft is normal.
Whatever! I mean who uses word. I do all my documents in excel like a sane person.
I’m sure you meant to say you do all your documents using the openpyxl module in python, from the shell, like a sane person.
https://xkcd.com/378/
OK, I must confess .. I .. love .. Spacemacs. Done, said that.
Double-spacing after a period was introduced with the typewriter as a way to work around a shortcoming of monospaced fonts and it should have died with the typewriter.
What really annoys me is how browser
contenteditableimplementations are so obsessed with WYSIWYG that they’ll insert semantically incorrect non-breaking spaces and empty paragraph tags to override the HTML renderer’s attempts to normalize to sane whitespace.No, it wasn’t. Double spacing after a period was used in movable type long before the invention of the typewriter. I’ve seen it used in blackletter books from the 17th century. But it’s certainly a relic of the past, with very small readability advantages, if any.
His point otherwise stands though. It was used with movable type for the same reason, monotype fonts.
Monotype doesn’t relate to monospaced type, it was a machine for setting lead type of any typeface. How the leading was set is an interesting question though; it could be that operators tended to insert two blank types at the start of a sentence, although I’ve never heard of it. I think they used to manually adjust the leading after typing everything out rather than double-space on the fly.
The extra spacing between sentences is sometimes referrred to in the literature as “French Spacing”. FIE! No more. From now double spacing will be referred to as “Freedom Spacing”.
Take that, Microsoft.
Typed English language is riddled with retardations like this. Another sympton of the disease is putting commas inside quotes although they, obviously, are not part of the quoted text. Again something inherited from malfunctioning typewriters and carried on to modern age.
I wonder, who was the idiot who decided to standardize these hacks for malfunctioning hardware as proper grammar? Or are the grammar nazis so dumb they do not understand the origin of said quirks, blindly arguing for something that nobody wanted in the first place but were forced to succumb to practicality?
Is putting comas inside quotes actually standard written English though? I was taught not to.
I don’t know about standard English, but growing up here in the states we were always taught that commas, periods, and other punctuation are to go inside the quotes. It never made sense to me either. We were also taught that everytime dialog was represented as part of a sentence, it should be followed by a comma inside the quotation mark at all times. Yet, it didn’t take much reading for me to question this either, since this is far from always observed in literature. Then again, we were never taught to put two spaces after sentences either, so who knows. This was in the early 1990s.
I’m starting to think English type is like English spelling, the only definite rule being that the “rules” are frequently broken.
In British English the punctuation goes inside the quotes if it is a part of the quote and if the quote isn’t a part of a sentence, if you like. So:
The Reverend Green turned and said, “get the hell out of my igloo”.
And:
The Reverend Green turned on him. “Get the hell out of my igloo.”
However as usual British English is more variable and less prescriptive than American English, so you see it both ways.
Confusingly, and because it wouldn’t be English without an exception, putting commas inside the quote to separate it from the rest of the sentence *is* done in British English. So:
“Get the hello out of my igloo,” said the Reverend Green.
darknexus,
Same here, I tried to buck the trend whenever I could. It’s just stupid to put punctuation in quotes when the thing being quoted doesn’t contain them!
I hadn’t heard of double spacing in all my years of school or university for that matter. It doesn’t seem to be a universal thing.
The english language diverges because “rules” aren’t enforced. I for one break them all the time. As I understand it languages like french have authorities to encourage and enforce proper french usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France
French has more spelling exceptions than most, but at least they have a language authority to enforce those exceptions! I’ve always thought that regulating the way people speak, or write for that matter, would be not only a futile exercise but, ultimately, against the spirit of free and open communication. English has essentially become the international lingua franca in part because of this lack of rigidity. English’s greatest “weakness”, as viewed by language purists, has been its strength especially in recent decades.
Actually, this is a reply to darknexus.
English greatest advantage is not lack of rigidity but, instead, it’s simple grammar. French, Portuguese and many other languages have a lot of verbal forms and rules for concordance between verbs, adverbs, substantives, adjectives and so on.
English greatest weakness is its relaxed relation between phonemes and syllables, i.e., even if you know how to write a word does not guarantee that you know how to pronounce it.
XKCD is always relevant.
One more reason to hate on Microsoft Office. Good thing I’m going to switch to all my document writing on The Last Word. https://atari8.co.uk/the-last-word/
Just checked your link. Definitely, I like THe last Word editor. For unlucky us who dont have the luxury of owning an Atari, we can use Focus Writer: https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/
i thought initially that this app was a gimmick. But then i tried it and i have to admit, it really helps to focus.
And the sound effects are a neat bonus, even though my mechanical keyboard is clicky enough.
FocusWriter is basically “the only one that gets it right” of a genre of word processors known as “distraction-free word processors”.
This blog post goes into more detail on why:
https://writingonlinux.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/focuswriter-and-why-i-now-despise-writeroom/
(And since the original, Write Room, is a $25 macOS application, you have a lot of people who are used to a paid software ecosystem and emotionally invested in rationalizing their purchase of the inferior offering.)
Good if you like RTF and want Word cross-compatibility. I personally have used ByWord on Mac for years, but there are a plethora of other cross-platform open source options (iA Writer, ghostwriter) that offer a similarly distraction-free experience.
I learnt double spaces from LaTeX, not typewriters, and in any case, most of the text that I still type is in mono space fonts, in programming editors. I find the double space more pleasant to read in that context. The Android keyboard also has a semantic use for double spaces: it auto switches back to capital case after the second space, which is easier and faster than the shift key.
What is really terrible in the case of Word is that any typesetting system respects any number of spaces as different from the necessary amount of stretchy space needed to make it look right.
I learned to type in high school on an IBM Selectric III electric typewriter and we weren’t taught to double space after a period. I had never even heard of such a thing until I saw people talking about it on the internet years later. From what I’ve read it comes from the days of old mechanical typewriters, so I’m surprised this is still a thing. Where and why are people still being taught to do this?
When did you learn to type, and where? Growing up in New Jersey in the 90s, I was taught to use double spaces between sentences. Don’t ask me why, I never questioned it.
Grew up in NE in the 80s and 90s and was taught double-spacing by all my teachers.
Grew up in PA and we were not taught to double-space. Then again, our district also went in for very odd, nonstandard grading systems, so who knows.
Using google books I reviewed several books printed in the U.S. between 1800 and 1880. None separated sentences with a single space. I focused on the year, the books just happened to be U.S. English. Maybe UK is different.
I think the point is that the extra spacing at the start of sentences in those 19th century books would have been done as a separate and final process by the typesetter. They would bash out all the letters into the form, then once the spelling et cetera is done, go through it and get the leading right and everything justified.
Its like the ‘space-band’ *gus3* is talking about below. These days that process is or should be done automatically by the typesetting engine, i.e. Word, LaTeX, CSS…
Having said that it is possible manual typesetters had another character for the start of sentences in particular. I’d be interested to know.
According to mid-late 1800’s printer’s manuals sentences are separated by an em-quad.
Personally I think it looks a little wide, but a single space is too narrow.
Thanks, good to know.
Computer, font, and typography nerd here.
Typewriters are by-and-large mono-spaced, and periods and colons require two spaces before the following words. Otherwise, a single space as separator.
But when it comes to proportional spaced fonts, terminology and rules change. The “space” becomes a “spaceband” to stretch or shrink as needed. The new rule is, double-spacebands are forbidden.
Thus my trick: use double-spacebands as field separators. The keyboard had no TAB key, so I used a double-spaceband as a substitute, pending further processing. Once I got the columnar spacing right, flipping double-spaceband stuff into tabs was child’s play.
gus3,
This double spacing was simply a matter of preference, right? I am not a literary buff and I’ve never heard about any of this double spacing on either computers or typewriters. Was there ever an “official” standard to double space? I have used plenty of monospace editors and I’ve never used (or even seen as far as I know) a double space after a period. I have seen plenty of column aligned text, but I consider that a completely different matter.
I’ve seen plenty of documentation with double spaces after full-stops, be it simple text documentation or technical manuals with proportional fonts. But wide spacing between sentences predates the typewriter, where typesetters would have a selection of space widths and it was common practice to use a larger space between sentences. Not a double space, but a slightly larger space. When the typewriter came along with a resolution of one character, the choices were single space or double space, and nothing in between. So it would seem that the practice of double spacing came from attempting to reproduce the slightly longer space between sentences by using two whole spaces.
The above commenters generally concur that, when they were taught rules about it, typing on a typewriter (monospace font) means two spaces between sentences. I was also taught two spaces after a colon (:).
Eight years later, I got to use a CompuGraphic system, which assumed proportional by default. In fact, you had to delimit monospaced font, in order to get the firmware to modify the spacing rules (and the delimiters looked suspiciously like the ancestors of HTML tags). If you didn’t do this, when the system pre-analyzed the document for rendering, it would stop at the double-spaceband and flag it as an error. That was CompuGraphic’s “official standard.”
And perhaps I should explain how CG handled spacebands. Their font encoding included certain metric boundaries, and one set of boundaries governed how narrow/wide spacebands were allowed to be, given the font size. Spacebands too narrow were generally solved by simply breaking the line in an appropriate location, so the words had enough space between them. But if that left too little printed text on the line, it could cause spacebands too wide. I think those limits (on our equipment) was 0.8 to 1.2 or 1.3 times the font size, but my memory is definitely fuzzy on this matter.
Seems like it wasn’t the first time Microsoft got rid of them 😉
Thank you, Microsoft, for making a decision on one of the most mundane questions I’ve heard. Life will be better for scores of nobody.
Hey, look on the bright side. Now we know why Surface devices have so many weird problems.
Waiting for someone to insist on zero spaces after the period.Punk spacing.For ppl serious about saving time.
astro,
Haha.
+1fororiginality,butwhynotgofurtherandgetridofspacesalltogether?
Languages using Chinese characters tend to do that. No spaces anywhere and the whitespace after a period or comma baked into the glyph itself as part of the font.
Maybe there’s a cultural difference there. The Gettysburg address, and those old “Discourse concerning…” books I had to read in college seemed to call for two spaces after the period.
And the “no spaces” causes lots of frustration for Indo-European font renderers. They treat Chinese text as one great big word.
Ugh, this is going to make reading slower and more annoying for me. A lot of people seem to be against double-spacing, but I’ll tell you one thing; double spacing increases my reading speed (and especially sentence reference speed) significantly. It certainly helps with my dyslexia and dysgraphia as well. You ever tried to proofread your work when the periods are dancing around? Double-spacing helps by emphasizing where sentences end in a way a period just doesn’t.
It’s why I’ve set Word to treat single spaces as an error.
Moreover when reading something with massive paragraphs like dry science papers where the sentences just seem to blur together, they’re fantastic at helping you find a sentence again. Without having to reread a bunch of irrelevant stuff.
subsider34,
Well, the thing is, at least when it comes to online text, the spacing is determined by the browser rendering the text and not how many spaces are typed.
Consider:
Test sentence. This sentence is preceded by 1 space.
Test sentence. This sentence is preceded by 2 spaces.
Test sentence. This sentence is preceded by 3 spaces.
Test sentence. This sentence is preceded by 4 spaces.
Also, although I can see that you typed two spaces after the period by looking at the page source, note that the output of your own comments only has one space, like everyone else. If you were happy with your own text up until now without noticing they were single spaced, then maybe single space was good enough all along?
If we explicitly use non-breaking spaces to get the space to show up, it should look like this…
Test sentence. This sentence is preceded by 1 space.
Test sentence. This sentence is preceded by 2 spaces.
Test sentence. This sentence is preceded by 3 spaces.
Test sentence. This sentence is preceded by 4 spaces.
I understand your point, however IMHO we shouldn’t be typing extra spaces, you’re never going to convince everyone to do it anyways. A better idea would be to have a setting in your browser/word processor to pass a spacing parameter to the text rendering engines on your computer so that all text gets rendered according to your preference.
As someone who reads a lot of science-heavy material, I certainly agree that double-spacing helps me to keep focus and consume what I’m reading.