Double Spaces After Full Stops

In the olden days, people used typewriters: these were mechanical contrivances which coupled a keyboard to what was technically known as the 'worky bits', with the result that striking a key usually resulted in the impression of a letter on a piece of paper. These contraptions produced text in a primitive fixed-width font, with inconsistent spacing, which was rather hard on the eye. In particular, ends of sentences were not clear; to make them more obvious, the convention of typing two spaces after the full stop (instead of one) was adopted.

These days, people use offset litho, laser printers and internets. These systems have fully-operational typographical mechanisms, and so are able to make the ends of sentences perfectly clear.

So, if you are writing on a typewriter, use Double Spaces After Full Stops. If you are writing on any other medium don't.

As an aside, the HTML specification calls for all linear whitespace (eg sequences of spaces) to be normalised to a single space for presentation, so even if you do use Double Spaces After Full Stops, it won't make any difference to how the page looks.

I know that- in the case of HTML it's a little irritating actually; for aesthetic purposes some more user friendly method of applying multiple spaces would be helpful, but I digress. I only use double spacing because, to me, when I'm scanning a page to edit it, it makes it simpler to break down into sentences and find what I'm looking for. I can't see that it makes anything harder for other users. -- WJR

Yeah, fair enough. Have you tried non-breaking space escapes? Use an ampersand followed by the four-letter code 'nbsp' followed by a semicolon. It doesn't play well with wiki, though: you can type them, and they show up in the page view as the code written out in full, but when they come back to an edit box, they've been magically turned into actual spaces, and then when you submit the edit, they stay normal spaces, and you're back to square one. Of course, the real solution is to find a proper way to do whatever it is you're trying to do. You should probably learn Cascading Style Sheets or something. -- TA

Category Typography?