Apparently some of my punctuation vanished along with the extra spaces…
I have changed to the modern standard of one space. In high school, where I learned typing on non-electric typewriters in 1965, the textbook called for two spaces. That’s obsolete now.
Okay, how on Earth do you just switch back and forth? You must be like Superman or something!
One space, and I have never been told to use two.
Me, too. It would have been 9th grade when I took typing class (computers were but a distant glow on the horizon), and we were taught to always put two spaces after a period. I don’t recall any real explanation, just, “That’s the way you do it.”
That sentence encapsulates perfectly why I feel old.
Son of a 1940s newspaper man here; I will two-space til the day I die, because I feel it makes blocks of text easier on the eye of the reader.
Of course, I still like to use terms like “screamer” (exclamation point), “crotchets” (brackets), and “Annie Oakleys” (free tickets for an event or performance, usually punched with a hole to indicate their complementary status).
It’s good to confuse people now and then.
I’m with commasense.
You might type two spaces, but it gets displayed as one.
In high school in the late 70s, I learned to type two spaces. In the 80s, when I was learning typesetting on computers that did nothing but typesetting (before desktop publishing), the computer program would not allow the operator to hit the space bar twice in succession. It would beep, and only accept the first space (if, for other reasons, you needed to have more than one space in a row, there were special wide-space characters called EN-spaces and EM-spaces).
In professional typesetting and graphic design, one space is the rule. In fact, if you look at any book, newspaper, or magazine you will notice there is just one space between sentences (if the type is justified on both sides of the column, the spaces might be wider at times, but that’s not extra spaces, just extra space, if you know what I mean). I’ve never found it to be harder to read that way.
One problem I have with double spacing after sentences is aesthetic. As a graphic designer, I like to see a page of type that has a nice, even texture to it. Extra spaces, bad hyphenation, widows and orphans (when just one word or part of a hyphenated word is left by itself on the last line of a paragraph) all take away from the look of a page of type. It might be esoteric, but it matters to me.
Another member of the “learned to type on an electric typewriter with two spaces, now converted to one space” club checking in.
As pointed out before, there was (and remains) a real need for the two spaces with monospaced fonts. With proportional fonts, it detracts from readability rather than adding to it, so it’s removed.
I suspect that the preference for two spaces will map pretty well to the difference in age, at least for those in the US. In my experience, those who learned to type on a typewriter or in the early computer age learned two spaces, while those who learned after the advent of word processing software and inkjet printers learned one space.
Question for those who are bothered by the lack of space after the periods on this board and other HTML presentations: are you similarly bothered by the lack of space around the letters “i” or “l”?
I’ve seen amateurish typesetting of some publications (newsletters and stuff) that use the two spaces after the period. They look awful. The text looks like it’s shot full of holes.