Dealing with the same, small issue over and over again would get on anyone's nerves.
I rarely have to deal with other's 'English' documents and yet it annoys me every time I have to double-space when editing someone else's document to keep it consistent with the rest of their document.
I don't know if it's "an American thing" but, as a resident of the USA, I find it "a stupid thing". Note my period outside the quotes.
Periods go inside quotes, in my world at least, when the quoted text originally included either a comma or period at the point where the quotation ends. Otherwise, the period goes outside the quotes, because putting it inside the quotes makes it an inaccurate quote.
Actually, it’s like the two-space after periods, replacing a longer space: it's a workaround when typesetting does not collapse punctuations. The dot should be below the outer edge of the quotes, otherwise you have too much diagonal white space — not unlike upper-case A and V should be set closer.
Not only does TeX collapse consecutive whitespace, when typesetting justified text, it will put whitespace back in the least ugly way it can figure out. It's systems like this that make me think humans shouldn't be responsible for things like "number of spaces" at all, unless they really know what they're doing.
Honestly I find his argument rather moronic. There's a long list of outdated practices that cost a ton more in productivity than double spaces and he has little hope of changing them as well.
Also, I like Courier AND Terminal.
NOTE: Single my spacing here is due to the iPad, not preference.
Yes, HTML collapses whitespace. It's to allow you to format and structure your source html with linebreaks and indentation without it effecting the output.
If you don't want it to collapse you would use a "Non-breaking space"
I thought that two spaces are to discern between the period that ends a mid-sentence abbreviation and one that finishes a sentence.
By the way - I think that the layout should be dealt with by the software that converts the string of characters to an actual graphical context. Why should I care what font will my text be displayed with? I prefer software that understands "end of sentence", "end of paragraph", maybe "end of abbreviation" (if necessary to make this distinction) and puts whatever amount of whitespace is appropriate for this to look decent. This usually isn't even an integer number of spaces, but rather a fractional one.
And yeah, I'm a single-spacer but rather because of laziness than anything else.
TLDR: A space in ASCII (or Unicode) encoding of the text != amount of whitespace in layout.
I'm inclined to think you're right -- except that two spaces between sentences should still be the norm when typing, until AI sufficient to correctly guess what kind of period you are using is invented, so that the software has the cues necessary to recognize what type of period you used.
I'm a two-spacer ^. Perhaps it is wrong by current standards but I still think it adds to the scan-ability of a paragraph. They call a paragraph full of holes ugly, I call it easier to scan.
And for the record, monospaced fonts aren't dead: all sensible text editors use them. Monospaced fonts are what I use to write ruby code (not many sentences appear there), java code (sigh... Lots of comments and sentences), and even LaTeX documents. I normally compose documents and long emails in a text editor exactly because the typography of a word processor is a distraction. Even this comment box uses a monospaced font!
^ except on the iPhone where it's impossible/awkward
The article glosses over monospace fonts, and leads with Assange, quite possibly for Google News juice, before admitting on page two that it's just a convention preferred by lots of typographers for proportional fonts.
In proportional fonts, a single space is better, although monospace uses two after a full stop and after a colon. This is is to prevent "rivers" and make it clearer where one sentence ends and another begins.
I type using two spaces, because a lot of what I type ends up rendered monospace (emails, comments in code, etc.). The nice thing about HTML, though, is that when I view the source, it's usually monospace, but the document will be rendered with a single space, and usually in a proportional font. (I know GMail and Google Groups hate monospace, so a lot of source code and diagrams look unbearable. There were ways to fix this, but I abandoned GMail last year; the Buzz debackle was the last straw in a long line of straws like its lack of threads. That's a different story, though.)
For nearly all my typing, I use a monospaced font because it makes getting vertical alignment, especially in tables, MUCH easier.
Essentially all my high quality word whacking goes through Knuth's TeX where his care with spacing is high beyond belief. There I include some TeX tricks to put a 'little' extra space after the end of a sentence, but to TeX a 'space' does not have a fixed width and gets adjusted along with all the rest of Knuth's complicated spacing algorithms.
For what a blog such as HN does with my text with two spaces after each sentence is just up to HN, and I haven't gone to the trouble to determine what.
Here's where the guy is wrong:
First, he is way too strong on running down monospaced fonts. Especially for programmers on HN, programming source code nearly always has to look much better in a monospaced font.
Second, and worse, the guy doesn't understand that in high quality typesetting the width of a space is not fixed. So, he is ranting about rubber.
Mostly all he is doing is ranting. Since he is writing for 'Slate', we have to suspect that he is all wound up, "full of sound and fury signifying nothing". Out brief candle. Nonsense. Detritus on the scrap heap of history nonsense. That's why I am always reluctant to read 'Slate': It's written for old maid high school English literature teachers who gush about Shaky Spire.
Programmers use monospaced fonts. (Undoubtedly for good reasons.) Nobody else does.
(I’m actually no programmer and I like to use Letter Gothic – a monospaced font – for my personal written correspondence on paper. I don’t want my letters to look like they were sent from some corporation and the monospaced font makes the letters more personal without being childish. I would guess that I’m in a small minority, though.)
Not just programmers. I've done some work for a lawyer, and a lot of filings and briefs use monospace fonts (wide margins and double-spacing, too). Most drafts and manuscripts are the same, to make things easier to mark up. I think it's also true of screenplays, but I've only had incidental contact with those. I'm sure plenty of other fields use monospace.
It's tougher to render (for instance) source code in a clear, easily understood fashion in a proportional font than in a monospace font. The same goes for a lot of mathematical and scientific writing, cases where red-pen editor's marks are needed, and so on.
He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong.
Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typefaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that aids in quicker text scanning by eye.
The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two (or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.
As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though: having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.
For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably lacking in the proud correctness he claims.
40 comments
[ 16.0 ms ] story [ 87.2 ms ] threadI rarely have to deal with other's 'English' documents and yet it annoys me every time I have to double-space when editing someone else's document to keep it consistent with the rest of their document.
in Comic Sans ;)
I don't know if it's "an American thing" but, as a resident of the USA, I find it "a stupid thing". Note my period outside the quotes.
Periods go inside quotes, in my world at least, when the quoted text originally included either a comma or period at the point where the quotation ends. Otherwise, the period goes outside the quotes, because putting it inside the quotes makes it an inaccurate quote.
Damned journalistic typesetters are idiots.
Yup. I haven't seen it in Europe, and I also find it stupid.
http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/pagenum/all/
Also, I like Courier AND Terminal.
NOTE: Single my spacing here is due to the iPad, not preference.
Edit: Indeed, HN won’t allow for two spaces.
Second edit: The two spaces are in the source text. Is this a HTML thing?
Third edit: Yes, this is a HTML thing. I somehow must have forgotten how HTML treats whitespace.
HTML ignores whitespace, unless it's inside a <pre> tag, or when IE randomly decides not to for in-line elements when rendering some CSS rules. ;)
If you don't want it to collapse you would use a "Non-breaking space"
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space#Use_as_non-c...
By the way - I think that the layout should be dealt with by the software that converts the string of characters to an actual graphical context. Why should I care what font will my text be displayed with? I prefer software that understands "end of sentence", "end of paragraph", maybe "end of abbreviation" (if necessary to make this distinction) and puts whatever amount of whitespace is appropriate for this to look decent. This usually isn't even an integer number of spaces, but rather a fractional one.
And yeah, I'm a single-spacer but rather because of laziness than anything else.
TLDR: A space in ASCII (or Unicode) encoding of the text != amount of whitespace in layout.
And for the record, monospaced fonts aren't dead: all sensible text editors use them. Monospaced fonts are what I use to write ruby code (not many sentences appear there), java code (sigh... Lots of comments and sentences), and even LaTeX documents. I normally compose documents and long emails in a text editor exactly because the typography of a word processor is a distraction. Even this comment box uses a monospaced font!
^ except on the iPhone where it's impossible/awkward
In proportional fonts, a single space is better, although monospace uses two after a full stop and after a colon. This is is to prevent "rivers" and make it clearer where one sentence ends and another begins.
I type using two spaces, because a lot of what I type ends up rendered monospace (emails, comments in code, etc.). The nice thing about HTML, though, is that when I view the source, it's usually monospace, but the document will be rendered with a single space, and usually in a proportional font. (I know GMail and Google Groups hate monospace, so a lot of source code and diagrams look unbearable. There were ways to fix this, but I abandoned GMail last year; the Buzz debackle was the last straw in a long line of straws like its lack of threads. That's a different story, though.)
should be able to write a simple filter for his e-mail.
str_replace('. ','. ',$str); in PHP or str.replace('. ','. ') in Python.
I know it's a rudimentary solution but it'll work if one can get so worked up over such trivialities.
For nearly all my typing, I use a monospaced font because it makes getting vertical alignment, especially in tables, MUCH easier.
Essentially all my high quality word whacking goes through Knuth's TeX where his care with spacing is high beyond belief. There I include some TeX tricks to put a 'little' extra space after the end of a sentence, but to TeX a 'space' does not have a fixed width and gets adjusted along with all the rest of Knuth's complicated spacing algorithms.
For what a blog such as HN does with my text with two spaces after each sentence is just up to HN, and I haven't gone to the trouble to determine what.
Here's where the guy is wrong:
First, he is way too strong on running down monospaced fonts. Especially for programmers on HN, programming source code nearly always has to look much better in a monospaced font.
Second, and worse, the guy doesn't understand that in high quality typesetting the width of a space is not fixed. So, he is ranting about rubber.
Mostly all he is doing is ranting. Since he is writing for 'Slate', we have to suspect that he is all wound up, "full of sound and fury signifying nothing". Out brief candle. Nonsense. Detritus on the scrap heap of history nonsense. That's why I am always reluctant to read 'Slate': It's written for old maid high school English literature teachers who gush about Shaky Spire.
(I’m actually no programmer and I like to use Letter Gothic – a monospaced font – for my personal written correspondence on paper. I don’t want my letters to look like they were sent from some corporation and the monospaced font makes the letters more personal without being childish. I would guess that I’m in a small minority, though.)
It's tougher to render (for instance) source code in a clear, easily understood fashion in a proportional font than in a monospace font. The same goes for a lot of mathematical and scientific writing, cases where red-pen editor's marks are needed, and so on.
edit: Oh, Shakespeare. Sorry, I should have gotten that.
Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typefaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that aids in quicker text scanning by eye.
The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two (or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.
As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though: having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.
For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably lacking in the proud correctness he claims.
http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57
HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2104266