Gentlemen, start your dudgeons.

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Steve Guattery:
For those of you who prefer multiple spaces at the end of a sentence, I note that LaTeX by default puts extra space after periods. For those of you who don't, that feature can be turned off.

--
Steve Guattery

Thank you!

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
And just to set the record straight, I don’t eat chicken with my hands, at Pavel’ s table or elsewhere in public, because my wife has forbidden me from doing so. She has seen me in action. It’s not pretty.

TikTok awaits you.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by robert ames:
i always use two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence. but please note what has happened to the two spaces i put after that last period. one of them has been dragged from the text, taken out into the parking lot and shot. microsoft is just trying to be as hip as wine disorder. good luck there.

Yes, I have noticed that. It is a function of HTML, not WD, to collapse whitespace.

for those baffled by use of two spaces after a period, i have the answer, and it is really not that complicated. readability, folks. as the eye is going along the text it will see the two space break coming along and will be anticipating the end of the sentence that is being read. that is a good thing.

Studies on this topic are, amazingly, few and far between and tend not to involve significant numbers of subjects. It appears that one reads fastest with what one is used to. The approximate gain is 3%.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

Pedantry on.

The origin of typographical spacing goes back to Gutenberg, as one might expect, but the first widely-accepted standards came in the late 18th C and persisted into the early 20th C. The standard was: one em between sentences, one-third of an em between words. (The standard included hairspace before and after all punctuation, by the way.)

If you wade deeply into this you will find that the English and the French implemented things slightly differently from each other but never mind that now.

When the typewriter arrived on the scene in the 1870s, of course, typists imitated publishers and so put more space between sentences than between words. Tap tap.

The publishing biz re-tooled for photo-typesetting (and, later, software-adjudicated typesetting) in the 1950s and altered the old rules. Typists, however, learn by tradition so continue with the old rules.

The key takeaway is that the rules for manuscript and the rules for publishing grew apart. Which rules you prefer indicate your heritage and what sort of thing you think you are writing when you write it.

 

[Jonathan Loesberg]

Thanks for both the correction and--even more-- the history.

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Pedantry on.

If you wade deeply into this you will find that the English and the French implemented things slightly differently from each other but never mind that now.

Here, and in France, in addition to the disconcerting decimal comma instead of point, one often (but not always) sees a space before punctuation, an irritant when you have absorbed the US standard. But I see only one space between sentences.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Here, and in France, in addition to the disconcerting decimal comma instead of point, one often (but not always) sees a space before punctuation, an irritant when you have absorbed the US standard. But I see only one space between sentences.

Yes, the French took the hairspace requirement seriously while the English ignored it, and vice versa on the 3:1 ratio between sentences. The explanation offered by the French is that they were concerned about the overall look of the page and regularized the spacing so as to avoid "rivers".

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Here, and in France, in addition to the disconcerting decimal comma instead of point, one often (but not always) sees a space before punctuation, an irritant when you have absorbed the US standard. But I see only one space between sentences.

Yes, the French took the hairspace requirement seriously while the English ignored it, and vice versa on the 3:1 ratio between sentences. The explanation offered by the French is that they were concerned about the overall look of the page and regularized the spacing so as to avoid "rivers".

A google romp reveals that "In French, exclamation points, question marks, colons, and semi-colons (all forms of "high" punctuation) should always have a space preceding them." In other words, commas and periods would not. So, rule of thumb: if the mark contains two elements, it is high, leave a space; if the mark contains one, it is low, don't leave a space. Sacre bleu !

 

[georg lauer]

For once German is the easier language. No space before any period, comma, etc. And always one space after.

 

[robert ames]

Yes, the French took the hairspace requirement seriously while the English ignored it, and vice versa on the 3:1 ratio between sentences. The explanation offered by the French is that they were concerned about the overall look of the page and regularized the spacing so as to avoid "rivers".

hmmm. . .can you explain 'rivers'?

in the main, rivers i believe are considered to be a positive part of the world we live in.

 

[Ken Schramm]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I never understood why, when I learned to type, I was taught to put two spaces in after a period. As soon as I shifted to writing on a computer, using a word processing program invented by someone in the American University computer department, which was much superior to the then reigning Wordstar, I stopped using two spaces and never looked back. This was back around 1984, so accept for maybe my first five or six articles, everything I published had only one space. Although many awful things have happened since then--Reagan getting re-elected, 9/11, the financial crisis, Trump, Covid--I'm pretty sure none of these was caused by the absence of that space.

"except"

I was wondering when that would happen.

 

[Ken Schramm]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

The publishing biz re-tooled for photo-typesetting (and, later, software-adjudicated typesetting) in the 1950s and altered the old rules. Typists, however, learn by tradition so continue with the old rules.

The key takeaway is that the rules for manuscript and the rules for publishing grew apart. Which rules you prefer indicate your heritage and what sort of thing you think you are writing when you write it.

When my book was published, and I was permitted to review the galleys, I became incredibly annoyed with the justifications for modern practices. With electronic kerning options, it is now possible to adjust spacing to minimize the use of paper and ink. Squeeze as many words as possible onto each line of text, and each page. Legibility suffered. Many of the sentences had spacing so bad that reading became problematic and uncomfortable. That, in turn, will show up (subconciously) in your reviews, which will impact sales. If you are a first time author, the publisher will have the leverage to push you around like a pawn, and you get what you get. Or, rather, I got what I got. My book got a fraction of the budget for photography and copy detailing that another book in the pipeline (from an author on his third book) that cycle got, and then proceeded to outsell that book pretty substantially over the long term.

The sales and reviews have been way better than my publisher expected. But as everyone here knows, the last few degrees of quality come from the difficult and seemingly economically unjustifiable decisions one makes in the production process. Wine, books, cars, food, whatever. American corporate everything is governed by "easier" and "cheaper." It's no wonder why we are where we are right now.

 

[mark e]

originally posted by Ken Schramm:

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

The publishing biz re-tooled for photo-typesetting (and, later, software-adjudicated typesetting) in the 1950s and altered the old rules. Typists, however, learn by tradition so continue with the old rules.

The key takeaway is that the rules for manuscript and the rules for publishing grew apart. Which rules you prefer indicate your heritage and what sort of thing you think you are writing when you write it.

American corporate everything is governed by "easier" and "cheaper." It's no wonder why we are where we are right now.

And don't get me started on the proliferation of perfect bindings. Will a book ever lie flat again?

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by robert ames:

Yes, the French took the hairspace requirement seriously while the English ignored it, and vice versa on the 3:1 ratio between sentences. The explanation offered by the French is that they were concerned about the overall look of the page and regularized the spacing so as to avoid "rivers".

hmmm. . .can you explain 'rivers'?

in the main, rivers i believe are considered to be a positive part of the world we live in.

A 'river', in this case, is a zig-zaggy line of gaps running down the page. They can catch your eye.

 

[Pavel Tchichikov]

originally posted by mark e:
And don't get me started on the proliferation of perfect bindings. Will a book ever lie flat again?

Books I can handle. You try playing Mozart sonatas with one hand because you have to use the other to hold the score open. Unless you are Ignacy Paderewski or Marc-Andre Hamelin.