I am just getting a document ready for online publication. I had reviewed it, and added a 2nd space after each sentence-ending period. Sentences the have only one space after the previous period look crowded to me.
I then gave the document to our in-house graphic designer, to add some colour to it. When I got it back, I noticed she had removed the 2nd space at the start of each sentence.
Apparently, the two-space approach is now outdated. Their style guidelines indicated one space after a period – that’s how they do it for all docs, whether online or printed. The designer remembered the days of two spaces, but that was eight or nine years ago. She didn’t know the design reason for the change – this was just how it’s done now.
A little bit of googling reveals that the two spaces dates back to the days of non-proportional fonts – each letter taking up the same amount of space as every other letter. Like what a typewriter does. With proportional fonts, apparently, we no longer need this. But I’m not sure why. If a period takes up less width than a w, would you not want to make sure that you had lots of space after the period?
Another suggestion mentioned that varying space betweenwords. But that only applies if you have right justified the doc.
Here is a bit of research on the subject:
http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html
I’ll probably leave the doc at one space, as I should respect the standard that we use.
June 4, 2009 at 6:55 pm |
Hi Barry,
Good point! You are absolutely correct to leave a single space after the period.
There are different types of ‘kerning’ between letters … monotype, true type, etc….
Monotype fonts use a uniform space for each letter. An example of this is ‘Courier’. The double space was a standard of the typewriter, which used monospace spacing.
With the advent of the computer, cognitive scientists and typography/ font designers realized that monospace fonts can be difficult to read. They aimed to improve readability onscreen, and to create a font that could adjust the ‘kerning’ between letters for improved readability onscreen.
Hence, the single space after the period.
Nancy
June 4, 2009 at 8:54 pm |
I understand about fixed/non-proportional/monotype fonts versus proportional ones, but I still don’t see the connection between the use of proportional ones and the spacing after a period. The proportional font does not recognize when it is being used after a period and when it is not, so the spacing after a period is the responsibility of the human. I am not aware that a proportional font adjusts the space between letters. I’m looking at the letters in your comment, and, while a letter like i takes up less room than a letter like w, the space between all the letters is pretty uniform.
The space between words, on the other hand, is adjusted, when you are right justifying a line. But that is not what we are talking about.
June 9, 2009 at 3:12 am |
Hello Barry,
You appear to have an interest in principles of typography.
Perhaps this website will be of interest, as it relates to your entry:
http://www.owlsoup.com/foamtrain/rules.html
Nancy
June 9, 2009 at 6:59 pm |
Thanks. Unfortunately, this site too talks about proportional fonts but does not explain how or whether a proportional font impacts a space that is adjacent to it.
June 14, 2009 at 5:09 pm |
Hi Barry,
I also like seeing more than a single space between sentences.
I think that white space is the reason that readers are drawn to look for headlines, subheads, captions, links, and lists as they read through a page. Wouldn’t more space between sentences make reading paragraphs similarly more appealing?
June 15, 2009 at 1:29 pm |
Hi Linda,
That is an interesting point: we use white spaces to make things stand out, so you would think that we would want the beginning of a sentence to also be distinct. I would also add that font size and weight would be other factors that contribute to headings drawing the eye toward them.
What I’m trying to figure out is whether this whole proportional font thing, which seems to be the reason why we no longer are supposed to leave two sentences after a period, has any bearing on the amount of space that is left between that period and the first letter of the new sentence. I haven’t yet seen a clear answer on this, even though some material I’ve read does draw a direct relationship between the advent of proportional fonts, and the change in typographic preference to use one space after a stop rather than two.
It would be nice if a word processing program could automatically put a reasonably sized space, i.e. bigger than a space that is left between two words, after a period. Word will automatically capitalize the first word of a sentence if you forget to do so, so adapting the space for a new sentence should not be that difficult from a technical point of view.