Monday, January 17, 2011

One Space or Two

Over at the Ann Althouse blog is a post on whether we should put one or two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence—a "Full Stop" as I recall it being called on Staff Course in the UK.  This from an item in Slate.

The idea is that the two space rule was instituted due to the typewriter.  Before that, per Slate, typographers used only one space after a period.  Then whole generations were taught two spaces and now the computer world conspires to automatically shrink two spaces back down to one, including Blogger, which is the engine for this site.

Over a hundred comments.  This is the best:
Tsk.  Everyone's losing sight of the real question here:  after being taught two spaces for so many years, who can we sue for reparations?
I like the two spaces and trick the HTML code to provide you, the reader, with two spaces, for readability.  The trick is to add, as I type, an ampersand "&" followed immediately by "nbsp;", which I presume stands for "nonbreaking space".

Regards  —  Cliff

1 comment:

  1. As ironic as it will appear, coming from someone who continues to write without capitalization (just 'cuz) on his blog, I will, I'm sure, forever maintain a preference for two spaces simply on the premise of the resulting and improved readability. Yes, I learned on a typewriter, and, no, I'm not going to make excuses for being that old. (Which isn't all that old in the grand scheme of things--just ancient in the eyes of my single-spacing computer keyboard jockying children).

    ReplyDelete

Please be forthright, but please consider that this is not a barracks.