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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

So that's why that happened.

Typographically, I don't think you can compare the visual effect of an extra period in properly rendered right-justified text with the effect when it's buried in the usual ragged-right default on the web.

In the early 90s most monitors didn't have the resolution to handle full justification without making it look like crap.

In theory it would have been helpful if there had been enough foresight to consider the situtation >20 years later. Because those neat margins look really nice.

In practice full justification would have used significantly more memory and processor power and would have been much slower. So although it's a shame we ended up with ragged right as the default, it's only become practical to consider high quality implementations - not just budget hacks - of more polished formatting in the last few years or so.

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Ragged right is not somehow inferior to full justified. It automatically creates rythm that keeps you engaged. There is reason most graphic profesionals prefer look of ragged right.

It's also pretty hard to have quality full justified text. To keep spaces consistent you need hyphenation and advanced typography algorythms like latex microtype package and paragraph composer like the one in Indesign. And it will still not be enough. You will need to have experienced human make adjustments - fix hyphenation and fiddle with settings. When you see full justified done well there is someone putting quite bit of effort so it looks well.

The reason it is so hard is that if you take somehow optimal length of 70 characters you will have only about 10 spaces on line add to that limit of 2-3 consecutive hyphenations at the end of lines and few longer words will get you to pretty tight spots. It's a balacne battle. Sure increase number of characters on line and then it will look even but long lines make things much harder to read and its the worst problem because you will not be able to catch next line.

Most often you will see justified text full of rivers or crazy big differences between space widths - both more distracting than ragged right. For some reason some people think its more grand and authorative but it is quite dogmatic view.

The main reason why it's used in books is that it saves space. On 400 page book it can make difference. But the publishers employ dedicated expert who does this work and goes page by page so everything is in order.

I don’t know. It sounds like you’re older and smarter than I, but whenever I see two spaces at the end of a sentence, I fix it to make it one space. It looks plain wrong to my brain

Double spacing between paragraphs is surprisingly helpful with smudged text on physical paper. Many linguistic conventions seem arbitrary, but are really about redundancy.

Punctuation could have replaced spaces.just like capitalization of the first letter in a new sentence,it’s helpful to make things as obvious as possible. Is that period a typo or are those supposed to be different sentences?

It basically did, except the other way around: punctuation was originally used where we would use spaces now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#Western_Antiquity

When you're reading a several hundred page technical report, those double spaced periods are really helpful for picking sentences out at a glance. You don't tend to read those in order from start to finish. There's a lot of jumping around, highlighting things, writing notes. Having sentences be easily visually distinguishable at a glance when scanning a page is fairly helpful.

It's kind of like trying to read tons of code with or without syntax highlighting.

Two spaces is probably wrong, but for typesetting it generally looks better to have slightly bigger spaces at the end of sentences, and if you need to stretch space it generally works better to do so at the end of sentences.

And you would be right. There shouldn't be two spaces. It's some old convention from typewriter times. Nowdays space is not fixed width. It's fluid and it's job of the system (browser, graphic editor) to make it right width.

In fact first thing book designer / publisher will do when they get text from author is run it through cleanup script to fix all mistakes and inconsistencies and one of those will be double+ spaces.

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