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You should give an explanation for this. On top of that, there should be more of an automated effort to automatically handle cases where people just habitually type two spaces as I do. Word provides a feature to address this, but it is not available everywhere. On top of that, the space between initials should not be the same size of space as between sentences, but my knowledge of typography and fonts would indicate that they would both end up with the larger space that follows a sentence.

How about.. "When writing email do NOT use custom fonts. Who the hell cares if you think it is pretty, you won't be reading the email again after you send it."

I concur with Brant: it's not quite that simple and the software should be smarter.

Both TeX and HTML ignore multiple spaces and force you to take extra steps to insert "hard" spaces.

I've mentioned this before: http://spaces.msn.com/members/jdanielsmith/Blog/cns!1pRjebUoVh0bNLSJvrecmAEg!339.entry

I would rephrase the tip a little more radically. When using anything more sophisticated than plain text, only use one whitespace at a time, ever. With whitespace meaning a space or a paragraph break.

All occurences of two or more spaces, or a space at start of a paragraph, are a “smell” — they indicate that what you are typing wants to be an indented paragraph or a table.

Two paragraph breaks at once signal that the next paragraph wants an increased interval before. This is achievable in Word using paragraph styles, and in HTML using CSS, but not in plain text where we still have to resort to empty paragraphs.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong!

I've been going nuts as more and more books are set with "French spacing" (where the space between sentences is no larger than the space between words). Color is important, but so is helping people see the sentence boundaries. Capital letters and full stops are good but ambiguous clues. Wider spaces between sentences help disambiguate.

For example, these two examples differentiated only by the width of a space, have different meanings:

"Hurry!"_Jack yelled.

"Hurry!"__Jack yelled.

The first case is a single sentence, the latter is two separate sentences--Jack said something *then* he yelled.

Yes, typography must be easy-to-read and it must be pretty, but not at the expense of clarity.

Rivers are bad, but they are not a direct result of using wider spaces between sentences. Good algorithms can minimize rivers regardless of the type of intersentence spacing chosen.

On this blog, with the particular font it uses, the sentences always look jammed together, especially when one ends with a period and the next starts with a capital T. To my eyes, it looks like the space is missing. It's very jarring.

Now I'll admit that two *full* spaces between sentences is probably overkill. I think TeX, by default, uses an intersentence space approximately one-third larger than an interword space, which I find quite satisfying. When typing in plain text, two spaces is a better approximation than one because the whole point is to disambiguate.

I pray that when ebooks finally catch on, we'll have options in our readers to choose which set of typographical conventions we prefer.

>Wrong. Wrong. Wrong!
>Wider spaces between sentences help disambiguate.

This seems like an unconventional opinion that should be very easy to prove or disprove, by presenting the same text with narrow and wide spaces and measuring comprehension. Kevin - any evidence for or against wider spacing?

So after thinking about this, I shouldn't have used "unconventional" in the post above. Still interest in research to back up the wider space improves reading theory.

Si

I can't speak for Adrian, but I think I'd add "...all other things being equal..." to his comments.

Sure, the example is contrived; and yes, the writing itself should be changed. But in the context of "one space or two", it shows that there can be a semantic difference. And that the hard-and-fast rule that started this whole discussion is just plain wrong.

> Wrong. Wrong. Wrong!

>"French spacing" (where the space between sentences is no larger than the space between words)

Is it really? Does your software not add a bit of space to the end-of-sentence period? Maybe you should get something better, then.

So back to double spacing at the end of a period.  Yes or no?  Do we have a definitive answer?