After the lively ongoing discussion in the recent thread I posted on “Behaviours we still do even though we don’t need to”, I thought this merited its own thread.
Microsoft has just weighed in and decided that they will start flagging the post-period double space as an error in MS Word.
I suspect this was not the result of SDMB discussion, but it would be cool to think they were monitoring it!
Let the debates begin again! 
An editor who was about half my age told me that writers who regularly send her manuscripts with two spaces after a period don’t get their pieces bought from her. That was all the convincing I needed. But yes, two spaces was what my typing teacher taught us back in 1978, when bell bottoms and long-haired humanoids were still fashionable.
I’m confused - MS Word has been flagging that for 30 years. Was it a preference or setting until now?
Not in mine, not for years. It might be a preference you can set, and maybe mine never was while yours was.
I took typing in junior high in the 1970s, on a manual typewriter. We were taught to double space after a period. But on PCs, I haven’t done it in decades.
It is a preference you can set. As a person who, decades ago, worked as a typesetter, I leave one space. As an editor who’s had to fix a hell of a lot of manuscripts before pouring them into InDesign, I leave one space. But a couple of my freelance clients, who I send manuscripts to, demand two spaces, for some reason. Also straight quotes, no superscript ordinals, and two hyphens instead of a dash. So when I do stuff for them I reset all that, including having MS Word flag one space because that is a habit I might not notice.
In general it’s pretty easy for me to remember to hit two spaces when I’m doing work for them (and I’m sure they are putting my documents into some kind of software that needs it, although I can’t figure out why). The other stuff though makes me wish I had two MS Word profiles–one for the straight quotes-two-dashes etc. and one for regular work.
I think you could always set it as a preference, and you still can. But it’s not easy to find!
If there’s room for vernacular Engish, there’s bloody well room for the double space after the period. It’s how we do it and the damn language rules are descriptive not prescriptive.
And while I’m at it, the Chicago Manual of Style can go die in a round of submachinegun fire, I’m using forwards, backwards, afterwards, towards. A bunch of literary gangsters in a town that doesn’t make pizza right has no business imposing their silly-ass way of misspelling words as if it were canonical literary truth.
What am I expected to do with all that extra time I save by not doing double spaces - learn Esperanto or something? Tio estas freneza!
I do my editing with ‘vi/nvi/vim’, all of which impose the double space by default after a ‘J’ command which concatenates to a line ending in a period. Taking what comes and choosing it, I accept the double space. What? am I supposed to delete all those double spaces before publication?
The double space hardly matters anyway: Almost all my text (including SDMB posts) is interpreted by an HTML browser which ignores extra spaces.
I can react only with laughter to the notion that Microsoft’s views on best formatting are worthy of attention. Have any of you tried to parse the ‘csv’ files Excel produces? To make such a file usable for code, or even ‘awk’, I generally need to both remove and add spaces, both remove and add quote-marks and both remove and add commas, all the while keeping track of quote parity. :smack: Of course I’ve automated this, but it’s still utter silliness.
My pet peeve on punctuation is the dash. The dash — which is used to separate phrases inadequately separated by commas — is completely opposite to the hyphen. An hyphen doesn’t separate — it brings words together, serving a band-aid role. Thus the hyphen is sort of an anti-dash.
I herewith serve notice that I will reject manuscripts submitted with hyphens used where dashes are correct. 
French spacing versus English spacing, hanging punctuation, margin width, etc., are all stylistic parameters that need to be handled by the typographer, and it shouldn’t matter if the original manuscript computer file has one space after punctuation or five.
English text may look better with English spacing— it is one of several aesthetic parameters to consider— so it may not hurt typewritten text either (but how many are submitting typewritten manuscripts these days? I would venture even fewer than are sending the editor handwritten manuscripts). I would still expect extra or too few presses of the space bar to be ignored once you get to the Microsoft Word stage (if I type seven spaces, does Word actually make it seven times longer?)
With iOS a double space becomes a period space, which is single, however it does give the habit of double spacing.
A subtle plot by millennials to criminalize geezerhood.
It is surely not just a choice between single and double spaces. The type size, style, etc. might have some effect. In fact, the old Chicago Manual of Style states quite clearly that standard inter-spacing at the end of a sentence should be triple that between words! (1 em versus 1/3 em; also 1 en after semicolons and colons followed by a lower-case letter, and 2/3 em after a colon followed by a capital letter)
Give me a double space or give me death!
I try to single space, but it’s a hard habit to break.
A double space after a period serves to unambiguously differentiate between an abbreviation and the end of a sentence, which is probably why vi puts it in by default. When I need to break up a passage into individual sentences or get an accurate sentence count, it means the difference between something like this:
Toward the end of the war Franklin D. Roosevelt made the decision to drop Henry A. Wallace from the 1944 presidential ticket.
And this:
Toward the end of the war, Franklin D.
Roosevelt made the decision to drop Henry A.
Wallace from the 1944 presidential ticket.
Of course, people who are only concerned with how it looks on the page will inevitably respond “Well, I’ve never needed to count or separate sentences. Why should you?”
Screw Microsoft. Aren’t we all tired of being dictated to by multi-national corporations?
I just made a few test sentences using Word. I used a mono-spaced font (Courier New) and variable spaced font (Calibri).
The two spaces after each period is definitely more readable in both types of fonts. I don’t know why the world hates readability so much. Haters gonna hate, I guess.
What do Penguin Random House, Oxford University Press, Hachette, Harper Collins, &c., actually do in practice, and does it vary among their traditional books, paperbacks, and e-books? Either way they are not relying on Microsoft Word in any way, shape, or form (except maybe as an accepted file format), and I assume they at least pretend to care about readability.
I would say they also have a financial incentive to cut down on the length of text to save paper costs.
Published books are almost always printed with proportional fonts, which renders the question moot.