I can only offer this shrewd bit of insight from Matthew Butterick’s excellent
Practical Typography:
http://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences.html
"I know that many people were taught to put two spaces between sentences. I
was too. But these days, using two spaces is an obsolete habit. Some say the
habit originated in the typewriter era. Others believe it began earlier.
But guess what? It doesn’t matter. Because either way, it’s not part of
today’s typographic practice."
Sincerely,
Ben Klebe
On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 11:12 PM, Gary Hull <yh82d7...@yandex.com> wrote:
> On 8 Jun 2015, at 9:40, Eric A. Meyer wrote:
>> On 7 Jun 2015, at 20:16, Gary Hull wrote:
>>
>>> On 8 Jun 2015, at 2:44, Ben Klebe wrote:
>>>
>>>> The autocorrect is system-wide in Cocoa text fields. To change it,
>>>> go to System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text and uncheck “Correct
>>>> spelling automatically.” Strangely though I can’t replicate this
>>>> behavior and furthermore why would you want two spaces after a
>>>> period?
>>>
>>> Please don't open that can of worms on the mailing list!:
>>
>> …he said, and then wrenched the can open further.
> You noticed that, huh? :-)
>>> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html
>>>
>>> Although I agree: two spaces after a period should have died with
>>> manual monospace typewriters.
>>
>> You and Manjoo are wrong: the wider post-sentence spacing was not a
>> quirky, transient artifact of typewriters or monospace fonts, but has
>> literal centuries of precedent and tradition behind it:
>>
>> http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324
> I worked in my middle school's print shop for a year setting lead type
> from a California case and redistributing the pi, so I know the
> traditions, and have read all the old pre-ITC typography books that are
> only available on ABE.com these days. I later worked as a graphic
> designer in a shop that went through the whole range of phototypography
> from hand-spaced display type to self-contained Compugraphic machines to
> Agfa-Compugraphic front-ends to Postscript imagesetters. Not to mention
> IBM Selectric Composers with Adrian Frutiger-designed fonts on
> 9-to-the-em grids.
> The point of books written for compositors is to teach compositors what
> to do. Writers didn't typeset their own books. Spacing decisions are
> made by the compositor, based on the font in use, the leading, and the
> particular letter pair. Today the function of the compositor has been
> taken over by the combination of the type designer and the particular
> system in which the font is realized (such as Postscript), which has all
> sorts of intelligence built into it, and additional intelligence built
> into the publishing software that drives the output (imagesetter or
> digital display). Again, the writer shouldn't be trying to force design
> factors like that in his manuscript (although click-to-publish bloggers
> have to assume some design responsibility). Fonts are no longer made of
> lead, you can kern without brass spacers, and you can negatively kern
> without filing off the lead corners of the font. The way that type looks
> today is the way that skilled typographers want it to work, and the best
> of them have simply better taste than the past masters. Old books just
> look blotchy to modern eyes, although they are beautiful as historical
> objects.
> At any rate, double spacer should know that publishers these days have
> regex routines that manuscripts get run through, fixing things like
> initial and trailing spaces and high-bit ASCII, and that /\w+/\w/ or the
> like is built into such routines. So good luck getting double spaces
> into print at a proper publisher.
> There was a period, I'll say mostly in the 1960s, 1970s, but also a bit
> before and after, when many low-budget publications, including many
> academic and scientific publications, published photographically reduced
> typed manuscripts. In other words, cheap typesetting was not available
> yet, and they couldn't afford typesetting. In these cases the style that
> writers had to follow specified "Elite" or "Courier," "double spacing"
> (two returns on the typewriter), the width of margins, the number of
> lines per page, manual justification (with double spaces to accomplish
> that, or half spaces, which some typewriters could handle, such as some
> Olympias), and so on. Universities had typing pools that could produce
> such manuscripts: They functioned as the typetting departments of these
> low-budget journals. In such manuscripts double spacing was often used
> after periods and other sentence-final punctuation, and then after other
> words if necessary to justify the text. People who learned typing in
> that era tended to use textbooks that specified double spacing. They
> were in effect learning half-assed typesetting. The factors that lead to
> that style no longer exist.
> _______________________________________________
> mailmate mailing list
> mailmate@lists.freron.com
> http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
_______________________________________________
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
