Sentence Spacing — 1 Space or 2? 814
An anonymous reader noted an epic battle is waging, the likes of which has not been seen since we all agreed that tab indenting for code was properly two spaces. He writes "Do you hit the space bar two times between sentences, or only one? I admit, I'm from the typewriter age that hits it twice, but the article has pretty much convinced me to change. My final concern: how will my word processor know the difference between an abbr. and the end of a sentence (so it can stretch the sentence for me)? I don't use a capital letter for certain technical words (even when they start a sentence), making it both harder to programmatically detect a new sentence and more important to do so. What does the Slashdot community think?"
False assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
we all agreed that tab indenting for code was properly two spaces
Say what?!?? Who made that decision? In the java world, 4 spaces is pretty standard.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
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Kernel is 1 tab, which is always 8 spaces. This is completely different from 8 space indent.
Thank you. People who indent with spaces should be shot. Indent with tabs all you want and I can view it the way I want (2 space, 4 space, etc.).
If you use spaces instead of tabs, I'm going to have to take two seconds to run some elisp to fix it ;-)
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
People who indent with spaces should be shot. Indent with tabs all you want and I can view it the way I want (2 space, 4 space, etc.). If you use spaces instead of tabs, I'm going to have to take two seconds to run some elisp to fix it ;-)
People who indent with tabs should be shot. Indent with spaces all you want and I can view it the way IT WAS WRITTEN.
There, fixed that for you.
Really, using tabs only works in theory. You need to be pretty anal to never ever layout anything using spaces or the tabs argument breaks down. God forbid I line up some stuff to make it more readable.
Yeah, yeah...this is religion to some. My argument is as moot as yours. Kinda what I'm pointing out.
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Informative)
God forbid I line up some stuff to make it more readable.
You can do both: use tabs for indentation, and spaces to line things up.
So, if you have a statement like this:
printf("testing 1 2 3 %d %s",
var1, var2);
the printf would have a tab, and that's it. On the second line, there would be one tab (to match the line above it), and then the rest would be filled in with spaces, like this: (underscore indicates a space)
printf("testing 1 2 3 %3 %s",
________var1, var2);
That way, you can set your tab stop to whatever you want (2, 4, 8, 3, 5, 16, whatever), and it will look correct.
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Whoops, I just noticed that my "tabs" disappeared. It should look like this:
[tab]printf("testing 1 2 3 %3 %s",
[tab]________var1, var2);
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Exactly. People who stick to spaces for indentation don't realise that there is a difference between indentation and alignment.
But elastic tab stops are still the best: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/ [nickgravgaard.com]
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People who indent with spaces should be shot. Indent with tabs all you want and I can view it the way I want (2 space, 4 space, etc.).
The ability for you to view it however you want is precisely what I'm trying to avoid when I set space indentations. Code should be no wider than 80 characters, so I can use cat in a standard terminal and see the results without them being wrapped around at illogical locations. That means we all need to agree on using monospace fonts, 2-space indentations to maximize available screen space, and you need to wrap your code manually at locations where it makes sense to do so, at or before the 80-char mark.
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You can't just pick your own indent convention. Things get incredibly painful when people use editors that auto-indent to different widths.
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Informative)
The way around this is to _indent_ with tabs and _align_ with spaces.
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I use four-tab spaces. ...and write *very* concise code, or it won't fit on the lines.
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ASCII back when there was 'just' ASCII, was an 8 space tab. MS adopted that where it was needed, and in my world, 8 spaces for a tab is standard.
If you're just indenting, whatever you like. If your envirenment or prefers a different standard, either adopt it or be prepared to cause problems.
I tend to indent 1 or 2 spaces, because I can make sense of it. But some editing software has its own ideas.
And this is not the most important topic for us to consider.
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Informative)
ASCII when there was just ASCII had a tab character which was commonly interpreted as "tab to the next multiple of 8 column". If you were in column 4, a tab would not look like 8 spaces, it would look like 4 spaces.
On the keypunch I used, TAB meant "advance to the next tab column as indicated on your drum card." For FORTRAN, that meant the first tab skipped to column 2 (line number), the next tab to column 6 (continuation), the next to 7, a few every four spaces, and then off to column 72 (card number).
Every reasonable typewriter I used had tab stop settings so you could define what columns a tab took you to.
If your envirenment or prefers a different standard, either adopt it or be prepared to cause problems.
Thus was created "indent", which converts code from all those other people's atrocious formatting styles into your preferred on and back.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Incorrect.
if (foo) { a = x; } else { a = 5; }
is trivially converted to GNU format by "indent -gnu a.c", and becomes:
if (foo)
{
a = x;
}
else
{
a = 5;
}
Looks like some newlines have been inserted. And running that through K&R indent:
if (foo) {
a = x;
} else {
a = 5;
}
Newlines deleted.
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is the joke.
Re:False assumption (Score:4, Informative)
The best jokes are never understood on first telling.
Back to the subject at hand, however, why not consult the Chicago Manual of Style [chicagomanualofstyle.org]? To cut to the chase:
Seems pretty reasonable to me, and it's from quite a credible source. Read the full page for justification (no pun intended).
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in our efficient, modern world, I think there is no room for two spaces after a period. In the opinion of this particular copyeditor, this is a good thing.
Efficiency has nothing to do with it. In fact, efficiency is a complete red-herring, since presumably in our efficient, modern world we could simply write software to be intelligent enough to automatically add a space between sentences when it detects a period-space-word starting with a capital letter.
The reason you add two spaces is because the additional space aids your eyes in determining individual sentences. If you only use a single space to delineate words and sentences, all paragraphs merge into a jumble. Two spaces gives the eyes an additional visual cue, and thus is far easier to parse.
and it's from quite a credible source
An appeal to authority is less argumentatively valid than an appeal to reason. The Chicago Manual of Style gives no reason except some hand-waiving about our "efficient, modern world," which is a huge, steaming pile of bunkum.
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Informative)
That was the reason in the days of typewriters. And it continues to be the reason if you are writing in a text editor using a monospaced font. But a word processor will space a document properly, such that the space between sentences IS wider than a space between words.
Abbreviations, such as Dr., Ms., etc. (Score:3, Informative)
Two spaces after a period that ends a sentence.
Otherwise, Dr. Ms. Mrs. Mme. Mr. Mlle. etc. eng. fr. and all those other abbreviations look like they end a sentence.
Tab, of course, is ASCII 9, not "n * 0x20", where n==some value between 1 and whatever. Look at python code, where leading white space counts - mixing tabs with spaces is dumb.
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Computers really aren't very good at figuring this stuff out -- how would it space "Mr. Smith" or "Prof. Jones" or "M. Chevalier"?
Personally, I'd rather have the computers figure out "Oh... period followed by two spaces followed by Capital letter. Must have started a new sentence" and correct appropriately.
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Informative)
because HTML is broken. There is two spaces after the preceding period but you can not see them.Now you can because I used tags. (no you can't because /. is broken and does not render the tag properly...)
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Funny)
And you'll get monospaced characters also. Speaking of which, comments in code are monospaced. Are two spaces after a sentence more correct there? Personally, I think it looks too expanded.
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Efficiency has nothing to do with it.
The reason you add two spaces is because the additional space aids your eyes in determining individual sentences. Two spaces gives the eyes an additional visual cue, and thus is far easier to parse.
Please explain why you used one space between all sentences in your post.
Don't browsers generally reduce white space to a single space?
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Please explain why you used one space between all sentences in your post.
He actually used two spaces. Unfortunately for him, browsers collapse multiple spaces into one. [w3.org] He lacks commitment; a true Double-Spacer would have used two non-breaking spaces.
Not a readability thing. (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as efficiency is concerned -WTF- people have a data density that they want in their communications, as the extra space allows for some time to comprehend the data, assuming that the reader is maintaining a pace.
Re:False assumption (Score:5, Funny)
It's a well-known fact that God uses 3-space tabs [gnu.org]. I don't want to go to hell, so that's what I use, but your eternal soul is your own call, buddy.
Consulting the Book of Armaments (Score:5, Funny)
Three is the number of the counting, and the counting of the number shall be three.
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However, Google also says that Android code should use four-space indents [android.com].
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I code in Python too (among other things) and I ALWAYS use tab indents with the tab usually being set to 3 spaces for display purposes. (But if the code is deeply nested I may reset the display so that one tab == 2 spaces.)
OTOH, code deeply nested enough to require reseting the display is also deeply nested enough to be considered for refactoring.
N.B.: I use the same indentation whatever language I'm programming in at the moment. Python isn't a special case. (OTOH, this means I never use IDLE.)
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With tabs each person can set their tabstop however they want.
And if they want it to look right, they need to set it to exactly what the original author did. Every time you decide to break up a line of code, you're making a decision that locks the reader into a particular spacing in order to have legible code.
Do you want to have legible code? Yes? Use spaces then. And if you can't handle reading code that doesn't use your "preferred" spacing, then it is you, not the code author, who has the puppy-killin
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No. You indent by tabs to the correct level, and add spaces for effect afterwards where necessary. Even if you end up adding more spaces than a tab width. That way it looks right no matter the tab width.
And then they set their tab width to something less than you did, and then the next level of indentation is indented less than your split line. It no longer looks right, it now looks the opposite of right, as in wrong.
Tabs break things. If you use any tab stop other than exactly 8 spaces, and mandate that
"tab indenting for code was properly two spaces" (Score:5, Insightful)
How to get out of work on a progeamming team (Score:5, Funny)
Ask "Should I use spaces or tabs for newlines?"
3. Hang out and serf web.
4. Discussion settled? Ask "Should there be brackets around code even if there's only one line? Like this:
If( foo == true)
a=x;
Or is it:
If( foo = true)
{
a=x;
}
sit back and surf web for a few more hours.
Re:How to get out of work on a progeamming team (Score:4, Funny)
Neither. Depending on the system you're working on, use either a carriage return, a line feed, or a line feed followed by a carriage return. Fortunately the return key usually generates the correct newline marker for your system.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Number 4. :
Yes.
Not leaving brackets around one-liners is an invitation to mistakes.
If you want to add a debug line to the one-line block, you need to add brackets.
If you remove it, then remove the brackets.
Using them always gives you one less thing to think about.
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That only works when there's not a coding standard in place at said company. A good coding standard covers all those points and much, much more, leaving developers to debate the problems that actually matter to the company.
I read this as "...leaving developers to create the problems that actually matter to the company." which makes your comment absolutely hilarious.
What does slashdot say? (Score:5, Funny)
[Insert one thousand opinions here]
The only one that matters: Is it still readable?
We have bigger problems in the world than "one space or two" ... for example, people's atrocious speling.
Re:What does slashdot say? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two spaces makes it easier to parse with a regexp. Any period followed by two spaces is the end of a sentence. If you use one space, you might pick up sentence fragments with titles (Mr. Mrs., etc.)
Of course, the question is really moot. LaTeX ignores whitespace and just does what it thinks is right. I am willing to trust LaTeX.
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Or a newline.
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One space (Score:5, Informative)
I've been an editor (copy editor, proofreader, senior editor, etc.) for 10 years now. One space.
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I've been an editor (copy editor, proofreader, senior editor, etc.) for 10 years now. One space.
Oh yeah? I've been a typer for 25+ years now. Two spaces (but HTML will render it as one without manual spacing which has always bugged me since 1994).
Re:One space (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been an editor (copy editor, proofreader, senior editor, etc.) for 10 years now. One space.
Why stop there? Really. Is even one space really needed? Doesn't a period, question mark or exclamation point denote the end of a sentence. Why go all redundant and put a space in at all . . .
Oops, I guess an ellipsis can end a sentence too.
I'm not being snarky here. But I am thinking that the answer to the question "Why not zero spaces?" would be "Because that would make it harder to read".
Re:One space (Score:4, Informative)
In this case, 4 periods are actually used....
Re:One space (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia's featured article [wikipedia.org] on the subject (happens to be today's, actually).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, he's not loco. He's correct, at least if he's going by the AP style guide or, indeed, many other such materials. It's one space for any proportionally-spaced font. (Fixed-spaced fonts (Courier, American Typewriter, Lucida Console, Bitstream Vera Mono, etc.) aren't used in most professionally-published work, except for stuff like code in a technical publication.)
Re:One space (Score:4, Informative)
It's one space for any proportionally-spaced font.
I use a lot of proportionally spaced fonts, including Times New Roman and Arial from Microsoft's True Type Fonts as well as whatever open-source fonts come with Linux. I can tell you that not only is a space narrower than an 'n', but it's also the same width regardless of if it comes after a period or not. Spaces are wider when using justified alignment, but across a whole line rather than just at periods. Further, periods themselves are extremely narrow: the spacing after a period is non-existent, and kerning will make the situation even worse by placing the period inside a 'W' or 'Y'.
As a result, single-space provides more of a problem for today's proportional fonts than fixed-width fonts, since spaces are extra-wide with fixed width fonts anyway (as in, not more narrow than an 'n'). It's hard to read either Courier New or Arial, in any case, with single spacing: my eyes wander while my brain processes a chunk of text, so I grab 3 or 4 words at a time and then have to identify where I am. Without the geographical landmarks of extra white space scattered about a paragraph, I have a lot of difficulty returning instantly to wherever I was every few milliseconds; it can take several seconds to reorient my vision sometimes if a bug or some other piece of movement distracts me for the briefest fraction of a second.
Re:One space (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with two spaces is that there is not two spaces between a sentence logically. Professional typography uses one single space that is longer than the inter-word space, but shorted than a double inter-word space. Let your typesetting system determine the where the sentence ends, and adjust the space properly. TeX and LaTeX, are happy to do that.
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But we all write all the time, if not intended for publication.
Should 1% or less of all writing dictate what should happen to the other 99%+ of writing?
Monospaced or proportional (Score:5, Informative)
Two spaces are appropriate for typewriters and similar monospaced fonts (Courier, Monaco, Andale Mono, Consolas, Vera, Deja Vu mono)
One space for proportional fonts (Times, Helvetica, almost everything.)
Re:Monospaced or proportional (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. Even with proportional fonts one space at the end of a period makes the text look crowded.
If that's true, why do you only use a single space in your comments?
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Re:Monospaced or proportional (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because html strips out the second space, and slashcode won't recognize  .
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Oh, p.s. if, considering my argument below, you really prefer standards bodies above the consensus route, "The Chicago Manual of Style (1), the AP Stylebook (2), and the Modern Language Association (3) all recommend using one space after a period at the end of a sentence. ", as noted by "Grammar Girl" at:
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/spaces-period-end-of-sentence.aspx [quickanddirtytips.com]
(she provides references to back up that assertion).
I should note that I'm more of a "rough consensus" guy myself and that this is a ma
Re:Monospaced or proportional (Score:5, Interesting)
I was about to say the same thing. Because in fixed-width the period is so small, the space to the right of it in its block plus the space amounts to quite a lot of room. In proportional fonts, you don't need to worry so much.
I am accustomed to working with and thinking about text through a terminal window - as a result I always singlespace my sentences now.
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No because a typeface is (should be) designed with spaces in mind.
Yeah, the world should be a better place, but...
I've seen all too many (very popular) proportional fonts that even with two spaces, LOOK like one. And kerning seems to be a lost art these days. Ugh.
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What about forestalled sentence termination due to interrup-- Hey, I'm talking here!
I believe the correct way to format that last bit is: due to interrup—Hey, I'm talking here!
Unlike the question of how many spaces should be used after a period, the n-dash and m-dash are punctiation marks. As such, they have rules for use that are much more hard and fast. One of those is that there should be no space between the letters on either side of the dash and the dash itself. This rule applies to all dashes (hyphen: twin-engine, n-dash: 9–5, m-dash: Shatner—is speaking).
Twice (Score:3, Interesting)
As an interesting note, the iPhone auto-enters a period when you double space, so the tradition is still partially alive, at least.
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As an interesting note, the iPhone auto-enters a period when you double space, so the tradition is still partially alive, at least.
True, but it inserts a single space with that period.
Depends on the font (Score:5, Informative)
It depends on the font. If it is monospaced (such as on a typewriter) it should be two spaces. If you are using a proportional font, use one space.
Not just problem for automatic parsers (Score:4, Insightful)
Space for readability (Score:4, Interesting)
If you are doing type setting, by all means use 1 spaces. But as you cut and paste your texts into different programs, you may be pasting into different default type faces. Sometimes it's proportional and sometimes it's monospaced. So why not use 2 spaces to be on the safe side? It's simple to programmatically replace 2 spaces by 1 space any way, if necessary. Let's be considerate of our readers rather than swear allegiance to a rule learnt in our youth.
2. Duh. But... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Slashdot Community Thinks... (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, dude. We're starting to worry about you.
Re:The Slashdot Community Thinks... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh damn, that's where I went wrong. I thought I was supposed to find a dog and adopt a girlfriend. The latter encounter didn't end well.
OLD NEWS (1989) (Score:5, Informative)
The Mac is not a typewriter not only lays down guidelines, but explains the logic behind them, such as why punctuation should be hung, why there should not be two spaces after periods, why text set in all caps should be avoided.
Word processor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Use LaTeX. (Score:5, Insightful)
Use LaTeX (especially if you're typing technical things), then you won't have to worry about it. Type what you mean, and let the typesetter and styles handle the details.
(I should note that if have a period followed by space that isn't a new sentence or a or a period following a capital letter that is, in which case you'll need to mark up the period with \ or @ to let it know, but these are generally fringe cases.)
Re:Use LaTeX. (Score:5, Informative)
Not really fringe cases, and requires a bit of effort, unless one uses \frenchspacing (which is not the default) so one _will_ need to think about it, since TeX by default adds more space after a period, so one must indicate which periods do not require additional spacing, e.g.:
Dr.\ Knuth was very concerned with the typography of his published articles and books. This resulted in his development of \TeX\ when early systems for page composition were unable to match the old styles. While it handles many things automatically, it does require a certain attention in the preparation of the text, i.e.\ indicating normal width spaces by preceding them with a backslash.
\vfill\eject\bye
William
One (Score:5, Funny)
During the early area of the internet (around 1990) i held courses and taught new users, how to use the "blank" correctly. Rules were:
People who didn't followed the rule were convicted for excessive blanking.... at least here in germany.
CU, Martin
Depends on format (Score:4, Insightful)
Myself, I'm a two-space typer. My finger know a sentence-ending period is followed by two spaces and they just do it. However, in certain formats, such as HTML, white space is ignored anyway and then formatted by the format-processor (obviously a web browser in the case of HTML).
While I'm a two-spacer, the medium in which we type is largely making this a moot point.
-geis
TAB is the one true indentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TAB is the one true indentation (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll grant you that on one condition ... if your fancy text-formatter is going to write in a consistent number of chars so that if it's rendered by another editor it still works, then fine. Otherwise, no.
A former co-worker and I got into this argument. His emacs would use a single "tab" char to display between 1 and 40 tabs because it "knew" what it meant to do, but any other editor might render it like shit since it didn't have the right number of actual chars and relied on a specific mode.
It caused huge problems with those of using different editors which didn't interpret the tabs the same way. Eventually, I locked him out of CVS until he fixed his emacs to adhere to our coding standard -- our manager agreed with me. :-P
If you mean it to be 8 levels of indent, you need 8 placeholder items. Not one which is interpreted by your *^&%* editor (and only your editor). Otherwise, you end up with vast diffs specific to whitespace, and not what was changed. The resulting document must be properly rendered in any text editor, and it must do it consistently.
But, yes. The Tab is the unit of measure, and your editor can render a tab as however many chars make you happy.
Re:TAB is the one true indentation (Score:4, Informative)
The original question was: how do I tell it to use tabs for indentation instead of spaces? Best solution I know is to go into each mode (c++-mode, java-mode, etc.) and tweak the indentation setting to match the tab width, which looks like:
(defun my-mode-hook ()
(setq tab-width 2)
(setq truncate-lines t)
(setq c-basic-offset 2))
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'my-mode-hook)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook 'my-mode-hook)
(ugh, why do I need to 'program' my editor to configure a setting... sigh.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But I think this discussion is about putting spaces after the period that ends a sentence, not whether to use one or two spaces for indention. Applying the above here, you should repre
Re:TAB is the one true indentation (Score:5, Interesting)
Elastic tabstops (http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/) are the future.
Ok (Score:5, Funny)
Typesetting vs typing (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever since proportional fonts came to the desktop, people have found it hard to decide whether they are 'typing' or setting type. (eventually, in the DTP era, there was even a book, The Mac is not a Typewriter [abebooks.com]).
In typesetting, all word spaces are treated equal (except by TeX, which implements a more typewriter-like convention after periods; it also subtly modifies spacing after commas, semicolons too). This may also be a European/North American distinction, similar to the spaced-en-dash versus unspaced-em-dash convention.
TeX, and the TeXbook, are where many geeks from the CS side of the fence got their first typographic exposure and education. Some of Knuth's aesthetic decisions, like this one, do smell a bit funny to professional typographers. But his implementation of math setting is probably close to definitive (damn it Jim, I'm a typographer not a mathematician).
Wait till they find out that German uses letterspacing for boldfacing, and that it used to be normal practice to have thin spaces before punctuation, etc, etc... The study of typographic conventions is easily a life's work.
Semantic markup (Score:5, Funny)
<posting target-moderation="funny">
<sentence tone="exclamation">silly boy</sentence>
<sentence>you <contraction>should not</contraction> be mixing content with layout</sentence>
<sentence>use an <acronym>extended markup language</acronym> schema that removes the ambiguity and allows the viewer to determine <alternative-list><item>his</item><item>her</item></alternative-list> preferred layout and punctuation <aside>or even see it presented in <abbrev>text message</abbrev>format allowing accessibility by teenage people</aside> </sentence>
</posting>
"...we all agreed that tab indenting for code... (Score:5, Interesting)
...was properly two spaces."
Like hell we did.
We're talking text, not code (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the question, we're talking about text, not code. I couldn't care less what you do with your code; however, as a professional writer, the new standard is one space.
If you really want to get into the the theory behind it, it's actually quite simple. We now use one space to avoid "rivers of white" in text. In short, if you look at a sample of documents that have been double spaced after the punctuation, you'll start to notice lines of white that run throughout the document. This distracts the reader and lowers the readability of the document. In typewriter days, two spaces made a lot of sense. Due to the large variation of widths in characters, it helped keep a more uniform space between sentences. With modern word processors and fonts, the need for the double space as been eliminated.
Now, when you get into typography and design, you're dealing with aesthetic and this will vary on a case by case basis. Letter spacing, kerning, and leading all come into play and it's less about the number of spaces you use and more about how you're using your spaces. In coding, I could see the use for even more than two spaces.
*NOTE* - It might seem contradictory that I'm advocating single spacing, yet I've double spaced between all my sentences. I'm an old school typewriter guy and old habits die hard. This is why modern technology is so great. I have all of my software set to only allow single spacing between sentences. I always do document searches for double spaces. All of my professional writing goes out single spaced. All of my personal writing goes out double spaced, completely out of laziness.
The bible says One (Score:3, Informative)
When in doubt, Search your Chicago Manual of Style (Score:3, Informative)
From the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Score:3, Informative)
XML To The Rescue (Score:4, Funny)
<sentence>
<word>The</word>
<word>only</word>
<word>way</word>
<word>to</word>
<word>fix</word>
<word>this</word>
<word>is</word>
<word>with</word>
<word>XML</sentence>
<sentence>
<word>Totally</word>
<word>human</word>
<word>readable</sentence>
</paragraph>
1, dear god, 1 ... today just write semantically (Score:3)
The first thing I do when I edit an article or manuscript is run a find/replace to find 2 spaces and replace with 1. Same as every other editor. So your spaces are all wasted work.
In the past it was correct to use 2 spaces when typing fixed-width type, and it was wrong when typing proportional type. Today, 2 spaces is always wrong because we don't use typewriters. Today, you just write semantically, not for presentation, because we have infinite varieties of presentation, your writing will certainly not always be published in fixed-width type. In other words, put in good data (a complete sentence followed by a space and then another complete sentence) and leave out bad data (extra spaces.)
> typewriter
There is your problem. Note that the year starts with a "2". There are these things called computers. They are garbage-in-garbage-out. 2 spaces after a sentence is garbage that someone will have to clean up.
Re:Quick fix (Score:4, Funny)
Find: ".__"
Replace "._"
Find morse code W and replace with morse code A? Ahy aould I aant to do that? (bad) fake british accent?
Re:Two spaces, bitches. (Score:5, Funny)
End of discussion.
Awesome.
Next topic: emacs or vi.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because some of us are old and spent many years in a monospace font, and liked it.
Seriously, I've been doing two spaces after a full-stop for so long that I'd never be able to stop doing it (I've been typing since the early/mid 80's). It just becomes part of how you do things. The reality is, it may or may not render in such a way as anybody will notice it -- that doesn't mean I'm going to
Re:Two spaces, bitches. (Score:5, Funny)
Not only that, they're so bad I can't even see the apostrophe in your sentence.
One of the many deficiencies of HTML.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the many deficiencies of HTML.
Perhaps. I'm in the habit of putting an after periods when I write for HTML. Problem would be solved, if it wasn't for comment editing code that strips them out (such as here on Slashdot which you can see here since I put 4 nbsp's separated by spaces after the periods in this paragraph, and despite the fact they are preserved through the previe
Re:Two spaces, bitches. (Score:5, Informative)
Notice when you read shit on the internet it is single spaced after punctuation, and not double spaced?
That's only because HTML decided that consecutive whitespace should be compressed to a single character. I may put two spaces after full stops followed by new sentences, but I'm not going to make one of them to (try to) force it.
HTML, also by not employing indentation at the start of paragraphs by, has steered people toward double-spacing between paragraphs. Print media prefers not to waste the line between paragraphs and sticks with indentation of the first line of paragraphs. Books tend to reserve double spacing between paragraphs for a change of scene within a chapter, and if it occurs at a page break, a line with one to five asterisks, spaced, is employed, on whichever page it will fit.
Re:Two spaces, bitches. (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot doesn't strip the spaces, your browser's HTML parser does. <-- There's two spaces there, look at the source.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try 's/\. / /g'. I can't think of any code that would get screwed up by that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)