2 spaces after a period?

[alexl]

may not be specific to word, but should a period at the end of a
sentence be followed by 2 spaces? I thought that only applied to
manual typewriters. thx

 

[Pesach Shelnitz]

Hi,

I'm old enough to remember typewriters and can tell you that there was a
rule to leave two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence. But even
in those days only one space was added after a sentence in printed material
typeset with non-monospace fonts, and two spaces were added in printed
material typeset with a monospace font only when someone wanted to simulate
the appearance of text created on a typewriter. Consider also that Web
browsers ignore extra white space in HTML files, so in that case your
question is meaningless.

There is also a difference in the way typewriters and Word create line
spacing. On a typewriter you had to make a carriage return (or two carriage
returns for double spacing) at the end of every line. In Word, you make one
carriage return (yeah, VBA has things like vbCr that originate from this
typewriter term) at the end of a paragraph. In fact, in Word VBA, a Paragraph
object is created for every carriage return. For this reason, increasing the
space between paragraphs by hitting Enter instead of hitting Ctrl+0 or using
a style with increased space before or after each paragraph wastes computer
resources and can force your VBA code to process needlessly large collections
of Paragraph objects. In the Word General newsgroup there may be someone who
can give you more reasons why we shouldn't follow typewriter practices in
Word.

In my opinion, word processors are not typewriters, and except in rare
situations, there is no reason to add two spaces after a period in Word.

 

[Gordon Bentley-Mix on news.microsoft.com]

A thorough and well thought out answer, Pesach. Good job!

If I might add my 2-cents' worth:

In the technical documentation world in which I work, a single space after a
fullstop is the standard regardless of font, and Word recognises this
standard by providing an option to flag two spaces after a fullstop as a
grammical error. (However, there doesn't appear to be a corresponding option
to flag a single space as an error if one wants to enforce a two-space
standard...)

I'm not exactly sure when the deviation from the "typewriter" standard came
into play, but it's been that way for as long as I've been doing technical
docs - and I started when Windows 3.1.1 was the hot new product. ;-P

Nor do I know why the standard changed. Perhaps it had something to do with
the easy of setting full justification using a word processor, or the variety
of fonts that word processors gave users, or with the increase in the
"online" display of documents where two spaces after a fullstop don't
necessarily improve the readability of a document. Or maybe it was just a
time/motion thing - one less keystroke per sentence... ~shrug~ Who knows?

In any case, one space has become the standard, so your position -

In my opinion, word processors are not typewriters, and except in rare
situations, there is no reason to add two spaces after a period in Word.

- is correct (IMHO).
--
Cheers!

Gordon Bentley-Mix
Word MVP

Please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup.

Read the original version of this post in the Office Discussion Groups - no
membership required!

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Also just my 2-c worth:

Nor do I know why the standard changed. Perhaps it had something to do
with
the easy of setting full justification using a word processor, or the
variety
of fonts that word processors gave users, or with the increase in the
"online" display of documents where two spaces after a fullstop don't
necessarily improve the readability of a document. Or maybe it was just a
time/motion thing - one less keystroke per sentence... ~shrug~ Who knows?

I don't believe the 2-spaces thing was universal even on typewriters,
although it was certainly widespread.

Althogh the original Word Processing departments were probably mostly
staffed with people who came from a "typewriter" background, I'd suggest
that WP practices were actually driven by people using personal computers
and WP in the 1980s with no previous typing training. (This is certainly how
things developed in the organisations I worked for at that time). Also, with
most packages, even today, you have to have one space to allow the package
to do its justification thing, but AFAICR in some packages having 2 spaces
sometimes resulted in far too much space - perhaps it was when fixed-pitch
type was being justified. We created a lot of documents with material coming
from various authors/typists and frequently had to fix incoming material to
conform to a one-space standard.

If you really took the notion of separation of content from presentation to
the next level, you'd get rid of that space althogether and let the WP
package insert the necessary space. But then you'd probably have to
distinguish between end-of-sentence markers and other uses of periods such
as "abbreviation terminators". In the end you woud presumably also get rid
of the period and mark each sentence with some kind of property like
"standard", "question", "exclamation". Although I can't see this happening
in everyday WP, I presume that that is already being done by organisations
building reusable/translatable textbases and presumably suitable standards
already exist.

Peter Jamieson

"Gordon Bentley-Mix on news.microsoft.com"

 

[alexl]

thanks guys