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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

I was trained to type two spaces after a period: it's in my muscle memory. This website treats it as a mistake. No typing teacher would downgrade for that. It's awful.

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Sir, this is a mistake. You've been trained by mistake to produce mistakes. We know it's awful.

No it is not a mistake. It is not fashionable in digital media thanks I believe to twitters character limits.

Look at any printed media from the last 100 years. Printing presses, books, magazines, newspaper.

A double space offers a visual clue where a 'mental breath' takes place.

It's true that the space between sentences should be larger than the space between words, as it is in properly typeset text, though not twice as large. Using two spaces is a way to approximate that when you only have monospaced fonts. It's no longer encouraged in electronic text when using proportional fonts because the rendering software _should_ adjust the spacing itself.

edit: monospaced, not proportional.

It "should" adjust, but in practice most software do not render spaces after periods properly. There is no in band signal to distinguish periods for sentence ends vs e.g. Mr. Thus there is a clear argument for double spacing in all contexts

> Look at any printed media from the last 100 years.

I have, and it contradicts your point. The single space is the nearly universal standard in modern print media.

It doesn’t make sense for monospaced to me, because the overly wide period character already creates additional breathing room.

It's not because of twitter character limits, it's because browsers collapse multiple consecutive spaces in html when they render text.

Two spaces after a period is correct?

It was on typewriters because the fonts were monospace so the period would have some extra space to its left, the double space after it made it easier to see at a glance where a new sentence occurs.

It was never "correct" any more than a single space, it was a convention followed in some places, and not followed in others.

Two spaces in monospace font is larger than the typical historical typeset sentence spacing, so it's always been somewhat misguided.

That's how I was taught in typing class in the mid 90s.

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