spacing after punctuation

users
#1

I'm so glad to see another remembering how things were - and another
reason I prefer [OO then] LO over MsFt :wink:
            when I add those 2 spaces, I want them to remain.

       With the age of these machines many rules of grammar seemed to fall
away; only to bring about less comprehensive communication ;-(

       And now with all this thumb-typing and even more use of acronyms,
et.al. proper communication skills will be declining further ...
           can we resurrect the ol' grammarians and Latin-Greek scholars to
teach the kids these basics before they lose all social skills.

#2

Anne,

Don't misunderstand me. I much prefer a single space after sentence ending punctuation for reasons I have written many times before. I was just surprised that Jury advocated going further and using an even narrower space. I consider that a little over the top, even for an obsessive typophile like me. I doubt that any such narrowing would even be noticeable by the typical reader. And the optical illusion of a wider space that Jury notes is caused by the inherent space included with periods and commas should satisfy the two space folks.

Virgil

#3

Virgil, I'll have to disagree with your last sentence. It's quite obvious to me when there are two spaces after a sentence-ending period rather than just one, even with proportional fonts (allowing for the possibility that there's a font somewhere with a wider space than the others). I prefer the double space, myself.

Dave

#4

I fully agree that it is "quite obvious" when two spaces are used. Having read professionally published books with only one space for over 50 years, when I find the rare document with two spaces, the extra space jumps off the page. I find it quite distracting to the flow of my reading.

I had never heard of the argument used by Jury that periods and commas inherently have extra white space (the space above the punctuation mark), which gives the illusion of a 50% wider horizontal space even when only one word space is used. I find it intriguing, and it means that when one uses two spaces, s/he actually creates an illusion of white space 2.5 times wider than a single word space. A veritable typographic Grand Canyon.

Perhaps I should have said that I *hoped* that the inherent extra white space would satisfy the two-space folks. I should have known better. :slight_smile:

Virgil