Someone at work recently told me that some of our clients are “two spaces after a period” natzis. These people will actually take a 50+ page audit report, and have someone go over it sentence by sentence counting the number of spaces in Word. They were known to send the work back for revision if this rule was not followed.
In my honest opinion this is not only insane, but also very dumb. Thank god I don’t have to deal with these luddites who do not understand modern word processing technology. Please read the following sentences carefully – what I’m about to say might be difficult to understand to idiots.
Almost all non-monospaced font (ie. Times New Roman, Arial, etc) are designed to be typographically correct. Most modern word processing tools do automatic kearning. This means that the period gets tucked in really closely to the preceding letter creating a visually pleasing gap between sentences. If you take out a ruler and measure that gap it might not be wider than a standard space. But it does look bigger because of the proportional size and positioning of the period. Using two spaces in a non-monospaced auto-kearned font just looks funny.
Fortunately I don’t use WYSIWYG editors so I’m usually not concerned with the constant bickering of the “N spaces after period” crowd. For me this is completely irrelevant because LaTex produces high quality, typographically correct output every time.
People working in publishing, graphic design and etc are excused here. It’s their job to obsess about minutiae differences in spacing in the documents. If that means manual kerning, or spacing then be it. I’m basically just ranting about people who have no typesetting, or design background and whine about the double space after period because they learned to type on old fashioned typewriters.
[tags]word, wysiwyg, word processing, two spaces, spaces after the period, typography, typesetting[/tags]
Personally I like two spaces after a period in printed text. I think it breaks up text into easier to read blocks. Given my preference, my design work displays this. Some clients disagree, they get what they like. I am a stickler for having some standard though. Most text I receive for publication includes random usage of 1-4 paces after a period. I insist on consistent use, though it’s virtually always my job to fix it.
Ah, but I guess you are doing there is typesetting text for publication which is justifiable. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the output of Word is really unsuitable for mass scale publication. The reason why professionally published books and magazines are so pretty is that they were edited, kearned and adjusted by unprofessional typesetting crew.
What I’m talking about is a business report that will be read by maybe 5-6 people tops (and half of them probably will just skim the executive summary) and then plopped on a shelf and stored on a server never to be touched again. For that kind of a thing, auto kearning seems to be a reasonable choice. :)
And I’d agree. I’d just suggest they chose a standard… any standard.
Paragraph Double-spacing seems wasteful of paper. I do not agree with it, and it looks bad in my opinion. My question (it seems relevant to the topic) is, why do some people require double-spacing? I could really see the the point of spacing twice after a period if there are a lot of numbers on the page. I think you could agree that spacing can apply to different purposes.
And the purposes should be kept in line I presume.
Uh-oh . . . I guess I am a nazi!
Always end a sentence with two spaces! The is crucial if you are a geek. I use that pattern to search for the end of sentences since abbreviation’s also end with a period.
Trust me, one day you will be relying on this.
Craig, this is the first sensible argument for two spaces I have ever heard in my life. :)
But…
It still doesn’t really apply when you use Word, because the built in search doesn’t give you that fine control over the text. You could probably do it in VBA, but ugh…
It is useful for plain text files which are font independent – so it makes sense to use two spaces because someones text editor may use a monospaced font.
If you use LaTex it doesn’t really matter because white spaces in your source do not matter.
Crap…. I didn’t realize most of my readers are really into that whole “two spaces after period” thing. Let’s agree to disagree. :)
Once again, this rant was targeted mostly at the space counting bureaucrats who have no legitimate excuse other than convention they learned somewhere.
Helping regexps is a valid excuses in my book. Although you could probably hit ends of sentences with 60-70% accuracy if you assume that the period is followed by a lower case character or a linefeed. It doesn’t work if the abbreviation is followed by a name (ie. Mr. Smith), but then again you could mark the common name prefixes kike Mr, Ms, Dr and etc as non sentence ending tokens.
Granted it is much more work, but it’s doable. But yes, double spacing after period wins on KISS principle. :P
Craig.. you ended all your sentences with one space after the puntuation… after saying you ALWAYS do it the other way. Now personally I was TAUGHT to do this, but in all actuality I never do, I was typing way to long before my teacher came along… and in CLASSES (I had one English class that required it) all I do is click ctrl + f at the end of my doc, and replace all “. ” with “. ” and so on for other punctuation marks. This makes it really simple.
oh and I am really anal about my paragraphs. Having a space inbetween them looks really bad… but if the last line only has one word on the line then it still looks bad.. and if it is all the way to the end it looks bad so i usually wind up writing more just so i get what i want… heres a small diagram.
text text text text text text text text text text text te
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text te
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text
thats how i like them to look… but I hate…
text text text text text text text text text text text te
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text te
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text
and
text text text text text text text text text text text te
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text.
text text text text text text text text text text text te
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text
one makes it look like a wall of text, the other makes it look like you didn’t have enough written.
Need to give yourself some geek points on that one!
I don’t use Latex that much, so I never noticed the single white pace thing. I have noticed it in HTML though.
I also remember WordStar (boy, am I showing my age now or what?) would replace any doublespace following punctuation (question, exclamation or period) with a special “End of sentence” character to help keep data files smaller.
As far as having someone make sure the documents follow this “rule”, I am with you. We all have spell checkers . . . how about space checkers?
I now return you to your regularly scheduled life . . .
Oh other acceptable ways is:
text text text text text text text text text text text te
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text.
and
text text text text text text text text text text text te
text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text
(sorry for all the email notifications you guys are getting ;) )
Travis- note that HTML converts it to one. I actually typed two . . . :-P
suuure Craig… whatever.
;)
Just to illustrate a point here I created two identical documents and I pasted the same exact Lorem Ipsum text into them. In word I had to indent the paragraphs and added the page number and then converted it into a PDF file using PDF Writer. In LaTex I didn’t do anything.
Please note the spacing after the period. I haven’t measured it, but there is a striking difference between how Word and LaTex handle the end of the sentence. I haven’t measured it, but I’m willing to bet that in the LaTex sample the space between sentences is actually 2 or at least 1.5 times bigger than a standard space.
In other words, Word is crappy to begin with.
Check these out: [LaTex Sample] and [Word Sample] (both are PDF files).
lol, you can almost say LaTex … streches… what word processing can do.
LaTex makes writing a … SNAP.
Its not just stretching the space after the period, its doing the column style text thingy(I’m sure there’s a better name for that)so I don’t know how conclusive that is.
LaTex pretty much does everything – it does kerning, text alignment, it figures out how to break long lines (ie if I have a really long string with no spaces, it will cut it in a convenient space according to grammatical rules), put the figures in good places, enumerate your bibliography and etc.
It is the closest you can get to professional typesetting without actually paying for it. :)
Oh LaTex… like the program ;) I was thinking something diffrent.
LOL! What were you thinking about? 8O
Latex :D You know… the stuff I paint on when i am about to go to the beach.
typing with rubber gloves on of course.
Nothing wrong with paying a professional for quality services… We are talking about typesetting still?
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