Double spacing at the end of sentences was designed for manuscripts written on typewriters. It had no place otherwise. Printers automatically eliminated them, part of their endless battles with typewritten manuscripts that included dealing with hyphens, en- and em-dashes, converting 1/3 into ⅓, and adding, sometimes clumsily, extraneous spaces to justify text because they always used proportional typefaces. Whole corps of proofreaders and copyeditors were required to check the work and galley proofs went back and forth wasting even more time.
Double-spaced manuscripts were raw product and had no more place in civilized society than loaf pans of uncooked bread. Only professionals like editors and professors, who got paid to deal with parts the public properly never saw, needed to put up with manuscripts.
Word processing since those days has striven to become ever closer to final product so that the work of cooking the books diminishes. This is a good thing. You can find a non-proportional font like Courier if you choose to subject yourself to it, but why would you? If you start with a proportional font you have an infinitely more readable product, even in its raw state. Those who think otherwise probably don’t want their doctors to wash their hands before operations either.
This argument was over decades ago, pre-computer, when electronic typewriters appeared. I got mine literally more than half my life ago, which is a long, long time. How can we be still talking about it?
I presume any decent editing or word-processing software can replace period-space-space with period-space everywhere in the text. (The other way 'round, of course, leads to disaster.)
For myself, I was taught (and habitually use, unless I pay sufficient attention) double-space after period, but it is as Expano Mapcase says above – it can only get in the way of proper formatting software.
I already mentioned nobody is submitting manuscripts that are typewritten. Doesn’t change the question: you are emailing me your masterpiece in Microsoft Word or PDF format, or perhaps you are a book designer preparing the next global best-seller. Are you going to use single or double spaces at the end of sentences?
(Also, how many characters per line, how many lines per page, …)
There may be more than one valid answer, but you cannot avoid making a decision.
Definitely not true, as the old Chicago Manual of Style advocating triple spacing shows. And if they changed the style sometime in the 1960s (??), it wasn’t because writers had abandoned typewriters by then.
The en quad spacing standard was a relic of 19th century typography. Different fonts, different printing techniques, different standards of what was readable. End spacing has been shrinking steadily ever since then.
I looked at Hemingway and Fitzgerald manuscripts online. Both used double spacing when they typed. An approximation of that would have been used in their earliest books. By 1950, the print edition of Across the River and into the Trees had what looks like modern single spacing.
That was 70 years ago. Even the oldest people on the Dope would have seen nothing but single spacing as a standard on adult books their entire reading life and also their entire typing life.
I double space because it’s how I was taught and I’m too apathetic to teach myself differently at this point. I’m not sending in any Great American Novels for angry copy editors to reject so the cost:benefit is pretty minimal either way. I’m going to just keep on keeping on.
The whole point is that spacing is the job of the typesetter or the typesetting software to determine. It’s not the job of the person writing the manuscript.
Under modern typesetting procedures and technologies, the optimal spacing is determined when there’s one space after a period In the manuscript. So that’s what people submitting manuscripts (or typing into a word processor) should do.
I have seen all kinds of crazy books, including ones where (I would not even presume to call it crazy) the author absolutely insisted on using classic modern-face (i.e. 19th century rather than Renaissance) fonts and spacing. But my question concerning the major UK and US publishers was to see whether their practice is really as uniform as you claim. Surely not all books look the same. Technical literature the same as pulp romances? There must be some stylistic differences. We have some modern books using baroque typefaces, others Didone, others humanist, but—what you are claiming— absolutely no variation in spacing? (even to match the look of the font?)
The software I am familiar with ignores extra spaces; it doesn’t matter how many times I bang the space bar. So I was surprised that this would even be an issue or that Microsoft Word would complain about it.
I would say that 99% of all adult book product, whether hardback, paperback, textbooks, newspapers, magazines, brochures, newsletters, scientific journals, or any other form you can think of, use a similar spacing after periods. Take a look at whatever paper products are in your house. They are all going to be basically the same.
Will there be some exceptions? Probably. Poetry, maybe. Newspapers and magazines with narrow columns sometimes put the extra spaces after a period. Stylized little journals of fiction.
And so what? There are a few people here who don’t use the quote function. Are they even 1% of all posts? Don’t they stand out as looking weird when they post? Don’t the rest of us wish they would get the hell on the program and not make our lives a little more miserable? Aren’t we correct in saying that the use of the quote function in online message boards is absolutely standard despite the few exceptions?
The one positive is that, unlike those who double space after periods, they never start threads debating and justifying their anti-social weirdness.
Agree that this is kind of a stupid argument. Do it the way you want, unless someone is paying you to do it the other way (for some inexplicable reason), that’s easy enough. Most people, the vast majority, do not care and will not notice.
What they actually do is one space. It might be a somewhat bigger space. I cannot speak for most of them but I can speak for some of them: they are taking an MS Word file, preferably one in pretty good shape but probably one that has been massaged, and pouring it into InDesign. InDesign will pick up two spaces, or three (at least my version will) so the Word file will be managed so that there is never more than one space anywhere.
Note that the great thing about InDesign is that you can set it to automatically adjust for “no rivers.” If you don’t know what that means I would sincerely advise you not to look it up, and the same with kerning. Because once you know what it is you can’t unsee it.
All this talk of “single” versus “double” word spaces itself reflects a somewhat antiquated point of view. Therefore I am sure Word is crap and unsuitable for anything beyond quick business correspondence, but I would expect a product like InDesign, aimed at professionals, to offer tweakable dynamic spacing and kerning based on sophisticated and flexible optical criteria, given the designer’s input on what looks good (no rivers being an example), making some of these calculations automatic.
100% of what I type will never go to a separate typesetter so, lo, that heavy burden falls upon my own shoulders. And my internal typesetter says that two spaces are just ducky.
