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Comment by bottle2 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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

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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