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Comment by seandougall | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only curmudgeon who can’t get past the extra space after periods in a post about punctuation?

Nope. Raging against double-spaces post-period was all the rage a few years back[1], so I'm sure it raises quite a few curmudgeonly hackles.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...

My sixth grade teacher cured me of this right quick. “Pick up a book,” she said, “—go on.” I did so. I looked up at her but she just looked back down at me. I opened the book. I looked at the spacing. I closed the book, looked back up at my teacher and said, simply, “I see.”

That selfsame teacher admonished me for turning in a creative writing assignment with single sentence paragraphs in dialog: “Paragraphs consist of a topic sentence, supporting arguments, and a concluding statement,” she insisted. I looked up at her, “But... books—!” She wouldn’t have it. “When you write a 40,000 word novel you can use one sentence paragraphs.” So, 19 years later, I did.

I am an unapologetic curmudgeon who uses two spaces. Or rather, my right thumb does. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, I use mostly mono-spaced fonts, and two spaces after a full stop makes perfect sense. I went thirty years between learning it and thinking about it, and then some point-and-drool twee bloggers made it unfashionable.

> then some point-and-drool twee bloggers made it unfashionable.

Outside of newspapers, it was always unfashionable. I mean just look at a book, magazine, or even this site.

Hacker News eats the second space. Which is fine. I'm not saying that typesetters should show two spaces between sentences, rather the edict against typing two spaces between sentences is wrong. Two spaces even has a (small) amount of semantic information. i.e. "This is a full stop and not part of an acronym or radix point, etc."

It's not Hacker News eating the space; it's actually how the browser renders text. That said, I agree. What I type into the computer is not typesetting commands; it's input to the renderer, whose job is to understand what I'm telling it and lay it out appropriately. So, putting one space after a period indicates an abbreviation rather than the end of a sentence; the renderer may or may not choose to lay these out differently, but at least it has the option.

HN could if it wanted to insert an  <space> following a full stop. It doesn't.

One reason being Mr. Twee I-don't-use-two-spaces-after-a-full-stop, that it's awfully hard to tell if "Mr. Twee" is a sentence end or not, or if "stop. It" is supposed to be something else.

That is, in the typewritten manuscript, the double-space following the full stop carries meaning which the typesetting system (HN's HTML encoder, here), would have to guess at.

Or, you know, there's another way. Those of us who learnt to type properly can tip it off with our fuddly double-spaces.

Bingo on the semantic content.

That's a point that seems utterly lost on most today.

When I type, it's ASCII in vim.

When I typeset, it's \LaTeX (or more often these days, Markdown). Which takes care of the fucking fiddly bits for me.

> I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, I use mostly mono-spaced fonts, and two spaces after a full stop makes perfect sense.

It's still considered fine to do that when using monospaced fonts, just as using the prime symbol (') instead of an apostrophe (’) won't raise any eyebrows in that scenario.

When your goal is to make something that looks like it was typeset by someone with an awareness of typographical conventions, then understanding those can be helpful. ("Twee bloggers" didn't invent them.)

"When your goal is to make something that looks like it was typeset by someone with an awareness of typographical conventions..."

If by that you mean typesetting, I agree. Typing and typesetting are two different activities.

LaTex, for example, will typeset both ".(one space)" and ".(two spaces)" into the same white space that is somewhat larger than one typed space and somewhat smaller than two.

I got into the habit of double spacing because it does make the TeX source code easier to read (and I often do just read that, rather than the typeset document), and also because emacs has a number of sentence based commands for which it uses the double space as a sentence delimiter.

> If by that you mean typesetting, I agree. Typing and typesetting are two different activities.

Exactly, and many (non-developer) folks may not have ever experienced the "two spaces after sentences" convention if they haven't sat in a typing class with old-school typewriters, and haven't been instructed on formatting monospaced type.

>the prime symbol (')

The typewriter apostrophe isn't the same as the traditional prime symbol (′).

Yes, my response assumes that KC8ZKF is using a computer.

I learned the basics on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which must have assumed a monospaced font because it taught the double-space-after-period style. Took years before I learned that wasn't always how you're supposed to type, and another couple years after that to fully break myself of it.

> Or rather, my right thumb does. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, I use mostly mono-spaced fonts, and two spaces after a full stop makes perfect sense. I went thirty years between learning it and thinking about it, and then some point-and-drool twee bloggers made it unfashionable.

I actually learned to never use double-space-after-period for text that would be rendered directly (e.g., not by a typesetting toolchain that would replace it with a more appropriate but not available in ASCII wide space) in proportional fonts before the Web existed, and it seemed to be fairly widespread advice. This is absolutely not something that was originated by “point-and-drool twee bloggers”.

I see this article quoted all the time, and every time I read it I get frustrated again.

>But I actually think aesthetics are the best argument in favor of one space over two. One space is simpler, cleaner, and more visually pleasing.

Okay, great? So your best argument is that you subjectively prefer it over two spaces.

>The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces.

Ah, but our valiant author sure was ready to put them in their place!

I find this whole article oozes condescension and faulty logic, and I can't help but get my dander up whenever I see it referenced.

Ugh—and to think that extra effort had to be put in place to allow that to happen, too.

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