preview.tinyurl.com/t3s7d -> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_archive_(spaces_after_a_full_stop/period)
When I was taught to type, the teachers said two spaces after a period and one after a comma. I cannot stand it when people type with only one space seperating words. I guess its the way you type though so many people still do it. I have seen that in many articles there are two spaces after every period of a sentence. I personally can't stand the practice and I remove the extra space. However, I could see how this might not be a welcomed change by whoever put them there in the first place. The manual of style page mentions this issue, but it does not say whether it should be used. I think we should be consistent, and most editors do not put the extra space, so it should probably be discouraged as a matter of policy.
Dori 17:11, Oct 25, 2003 (UTC) I was always taught to put two spaces after a period when typing. I don't really know why that is, because it shows up the same in the end, doesn't it?
jimfbleak 17:20, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC) You are right, 2 spaces makes for easier reading. However, if these pages are rendered according to standard HTML rules (I think they are), you are both wasting your time. HTML ignores all series of spaces after the first one, so 2 spaces (or 10 spaces) are always displayed as one.
Dori 17:29, Oct 25, 2003 (UTC) It is typically a US habit. Some editors even ADD a second space after a period automatically when paragraphs are reformatted. I think the practice dates from the monospace typewriter era.
Viajero 17:42, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC) I always use two in my usual typing, but in HTML it just doesn't matter at all, even to me, unless you use the Since it results in saving a little bit of space and bandwidth, I prefer the single space where it won't matter anyway, and will usually remove the double spaces in things I'm editing anyway.
Martin 18:31, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC) It might matter to unfocused typists, as me. A typical example might be the two spaces after a period-sign for US typewriters, or the space-before-{colon, exclamation mark, question mark} typical for French typists. Another example, relevant for me, is the process of inserting a carriage-return in a paragraph. Due to some reason, unknown to me, I've got used to making one jump forward from the period-sign before I hit the carriage-return buttom. at least not until I've hit show-preview (if I'm lucky).
Ruhrjung 23:03, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC) I personally like it, because it makes for easier automated parsing of sentences if that's ever desirable. If there's only one space after periods, you cannot easily distinguish an internal period (as in "eg blah") from a sentence-ending period.
LaTeX or professional typesetting, generally one-and-one-half space are used after sentence-ending periods). But in general I'd say good practice is to leave them as they are---don't go through and convert them from one to the other.
LaTeX almost always get it right when determining whether a period ends a sentence or not - regardless whether a period is followed by one or more spaces. The main rule to follow is that period ends a sentence if it's followed by whitespace and a capital letter. Most internal periods aren't followed by space and a capital letter.
Abigail 12:05, May 18, 2004 (UTC) Except that the most common usage of internal spaces, titles such as Mr Smith, are always followed by a space and a capital letter... It would be virtually impossible for me to stop doing it, it's a reflex now. I'd also take it as an insult if someone were to go along behind me and change my two spaces to one. It's the same as if I were to go around to change all English spellings to American.
Ruhrjung 06:42, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC) That's not what I meant at all. I am not going to edit an article just to remove double spaces. What I meant is if I am editing an article, in the part that I am editing, I like to remove the double spaces and I didn't want someone to get angry at me for this. As justification, I was saying that most articles do not have double spaces and if I remove them, it looks more consistent, and besides the spaces aren't even visible in the article so there is no point in putting them unless you are used to them. I wouldn't get angry at people who put them in, but I just can't help removing them, they look very wrong to me. Also, if someone edits an article I started and puts in two spaces in the stuff they add, I am not going to go and edit the article just to remove the double spaces.
Tarquin 09:50, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC) I, too, was taught to type two spaces after a period. As soon as I learned to type, I hardly ever used handwriting again. I typed, using two spaces after every period, through high school, through college, through graduate school. I typed two spaces after every period on punch cards, on paper tape, in FRTRAN comments, in SNOBOL comments, in C comments, in every computer context that wasn't going to be parsed by machine. I typed two spaces after every period in TECO, in RUNOFF, in Word-11, in AppleWriter, in WordStar. It was a fixed habit that I probably practiced an average of several hundred times a day, every day, for over thirty years. Then I got my first Macintosh, and discovered that typing two spaces after the period is not appropriate in proportionally-spaced type. At about the same time, I learned to use italics for emphasis instead of underlining, and that an open quote is different from a close quote. Usages do change with time, and while I am a crotchety middle-aged guy who is set in his ways and has the illusion that he is Upholding Standards, I try not to be too hidebound about it. And I have stopped typing two spaces after every period. It would never occur to me that it's worth changing anyone else's usage, however. But, by Jingo, I still put an apostrophe in Halloween and I defy anyone to stop me!
Delirium 22:34, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC) I'm surprised that so few people stopped to consider the possibility that there might be a reason why you were taught to use two spaces between sentences. I find that it's easier to read a block of text if there's more space between sentences than within. The block scans into sentences automatically, and so greatly eases skimming through the text.
Emacs commands for moving between sentences: M-e moves forward one sentence and M-a moves back one sentence. If you need to navigate long, unbroken lines, like when editing Wikipedia, they are to live by. Oh, but they only work properly when two spaces are put between each sentence.
Daniel Brockman 09:25, Mar 7, 2004 (UTC) I believe that two spaces after a period is appropriate for monospaced text, such as typing on a typewriter. But when you're working with proportional-spaced text on a web page (like here), the HTML renderer will ignore the number of spaces you use, and will instead put the proper amount of space after a period. You could use twenty spaces after a period, and there won't be any added space seen when you display the page. So the only effect of using more than one space here instead of one is to make your articles take up a trivial amount of extra space in the database.
Brian Kendig 14:08, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC) Of course, the editing textbox (which is the only place where it makes a difference whether you use two spaces or one), uses a monospaced font. So, by that rationale, it is correct to use two spaces, not one. Type it however you want, don't go around changing it for others.
Falcon 20:19, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC) Modern proportional fonts have what's known as a "kerning table" that contains the optimum spacing for every possible combination of adjacent characters (including spaces). When authors create new fonts, they spend a lot of time compiling this information according to the actual shapes of their fonts' characters. When you stick in an extra space after a sentence, you defeat this wonderful capability the font's author worked so hard to include. But take heart: You've already made the far-more-challenging leap from typewriter to computer. As a professional typographer and type designer with over 35 years experience, I consider placing two spaces after periods to be an anachronistic typewriter convention perpetuated by high school teachers who don't know be...
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