One Space Between Sentences

Once upon a time, everybody was told to put two spaces between sentences when they were typing something. There was a very good reason for this. Back in the days when we were using typewriters with monospaced fonts - where all characters have the same width - the two spaces were needed to visually separate sentences from one another.

That reason no longer applies. Almost everything we read today - either online or in print - is in nice, pretty variable-width fonts. The "A" is maybe twice as wide as the "l", for example, and the space is as wide as the font designer decided it should be for the purposes of readability.

People are still using two spaces between sentences, though, because they learned the rule long ago without ever knowing the justification for the rule. But today, if you write for a magazine or a newspaper, OneSpaceBetweenSentences is generally the rule.

If it makes you feel any better, in HTML (and by extension on Wiki), you can write as many spaces after a period and it will still turn out to be one space. See?

I heard a discussion on this a while back that claimed that the two-space rule was superseded in the newsprint industry by a one-space rule, because it allowed a small amount of extra print to be crammed onto a page. The claim was made that you can tell whether a Style book is newsprint-centric by looking at which way the book goes on this rule. -- DaveSmith

Proper "publishing" software, which uses variable-width fonts, "knows" that the space between words should be "small," while the space after a colon (':') or end-of-sentence period ('.') should be "large." So, when using proper "publishing" software, one should use only one space, because the software will figure out the proper amount of space. Excess spaces in the input document would be redundant and confusing. -- JeffGrigg

TeX does it right. In TeX, one space is as good as 100. It's a typesetter; that's its job: to know how big the spaces between words, lines, paragraphs, etc. ought to be. Why word processors don't get this right is beyond me. -- AlainPicard

Well, it's hard to get in the general case: What about if there is a sentence with a point in between? For example: I am working hard, i.e. I am a good worker. In (La)TeX you can add special symbols to signalize this is not the end of a sentence. In Word you can't.

(Of course TeX does it right; it's a real publishing tool. ;-)

However, when dealing with word processors that claim, beyond their ability, to be publishing packages (like Microsoft Word, for instance), keep doing the two spaces (in violation of Micosoft's internal standards), because the tool still doesn't do it right! -- JeffGrigg

Does StarOffice do it "right"?

A word processor could have a special "." that doesn't indicate an end of sentence. Most WPS already have non-breaking spaces and non-breaking hyphens - so there is a precedent. An "auto-correct" could put this after common abbreviations (Mr. i.e. eg. and so on...).

Right: Word has three different sizes of hyphen/dash and three different sizes of the "space character" (plus non breaking space). Word's habit of automagically changing quote and apostrophe characters (and others) to the symbols it thinks you meant is legendary. But in spite of all this potential, it still doesn't do it.

I'm running Word 2000 right here, so I did some vertical bars (|) and periods, screen print, and some pixel-by-pixel comparisons in Paint: Nope; Word doesn't do anything special with spaces after a period at the end of a sentence.