How many spaces between sentences?

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

@robby

…IMHO, two spaces between sentences doesn’t look better or enhance clarity, which is probably why virtually every bit of typeset print that everyone here has ever read in their lives only has a single space between sentences. Look at any professionally-produced magazine or book if you don’t believe me.

You only see two spaces in monospaced, typed documents and word-processed documents by people who still think that the modern word processor is a typewriter.

No you don’t. As I mentioned in a previous thread (can’t be bothered looking, but I remember pulykammel was involved) there’s plenty of examples of typeset documents with double or one-and-a-half spacing after a full stop. From what I can gather, the “hard and fast rule” that everybody talks about when referencing double spacing is anything but, and a relatively recent innovation. Witness Wikipedia’s take on Sentence Spacing, for instance:

Since the introduction of movable-type printing in Europe, various sentence spacing conventions have been used in languages with a Latin-derived alphabet.[2]
These include a normal word space (as between the words in a sentence), a single enlarged space, and two full spaces. Although modern digital fonts can automatically adjust a single word space to create visually pleasing and consistent spacing following terminal punctuation,[3] most debate is about whether to strike a keyboard’s spacebar once or twice between sentences.[4]

Besides, I’ll say again, virtually every typeset mathematics, physics and computer science textbook uses English spacing, or a near approximation of it. There are still plenty of typeset books being produced today that eschew single spacing, in favour of enlarged spaces after full stops.