Hello all,
I came across a website that has a double space after a period.
Now, since HTML collapses all whitespace after one space, this has me a bit puzzled. Maybe someone can lend me some advice.
I checked the following:
So, anyone have any other ideas for doing this double space?
Thanks.
how did the website you’re talking about do it?
was the line of text justified both left and right, by any chance?
I’m not sure… that’s what I’m trying to figure out.
They didn’t have any weird alignments. The had a paragraph element which had two spaces after each period, which are typed in there (as spaces, not nbsp) and actually displayed them. It’s text-align left.
This is the site: http://www.internaldrive.com/
Notice in the left column in the “main” area that after each sentence there are two spaces.
it’s got a hard-coded decimal 160 or hex A0 character right after the period, followed by a regular space
hex A0 is what you get with
Ah, sneaky.
I know it’s a Wordpress site, so it must be Wordpress sneaking that in there.
Thanks Rudy, I would have never found that. =p
Keep in mind that double spacing after a punctuation mark is considered very old fashioned, stemming from typewriters and monospace fonts.
Related fallacy #1: 72 characters per line is optimal for readability.
Now that we use proportional fonts, double-spacing after the full-stop actually reduces readability.
It’s now considered to be two alphabets per line as the maximum without impacting readability.
Interesting. A few years ago I was taking an Eng101 class (as a ‘non traditional’ i.e. ‘older’ student) and one (of many) thing I would go wild with the red pen on classmates papers was not correctly putting two spaces after the period. Some of the ‘older’ students like myself remembered this standard from when we took typing in high school (on an IBM Selectric 
), the younger crowd had never heard of it. Oddly, the teacher - who was older than any of the students - claimed to never have heard of it either?!?
Just out of curiosity, where do you find these notes on what is currently accepted as ‘improving’ readability?
In terms of the two-spaces situation, that began earlier in January and then took off as columnists steamed ahead about it.
The ones that have come to my attention have been via my regular news feeds, where they are inspired from a Slate magazine article:
Jan 13 Space Invaders - Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period. [slate.com]
[list][]Jan 14 Why You Should Never, Ever Use Two Spaces Between Sentences [theatlantic.com]
[*]Jan 16 [i]Please[/i] Stop Putting Two Spaces After a Period [newser.com]
[]Jan 17 An Argument Against Using Two Spaces Between Sentences [lifehacker.com]
[/list]
It all stems though from official sources such as the Chicago Manual of Style.
One Space or Two? [chicagomanualofstyle.org]
Meanwhile, to answer your question:
The wikipedia page on Sentence spacing notes that studys about it have often been quite conflicting.
Effects on readability and legibility
So to make your choice, you should pick a style guide, like the Chicago Manual of Style, and stick with them and their recommendations over time.
Here’s a quick jingle that I’ve created about this.
[indent]Double space your monospace.
When proportional, keep it single.[/indent]
[citation needed]? 
This study: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLength.asp suggests that people have a preference for shorter (35 chars) or longer (95 chars) lines. Most preferred longer lines. this one follows the same trend
Citation?
The Elements of Typographic Style is quoted on the [url=“http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Vertical_Motion/2.2.2/”]Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web where 45-75 for single-column content, and 40-50 characters are for multi-column content.
http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Vertical_Motion/2.2.2/
Then comes the Agile Documentation book which in the Layout and Typography section has a section (page 101) explicitly about this:
[indent]Two Alphabets per Line
Problem - What is the optimum line width?
Forces - When reading, the reader’s eyes travel along the line from left to right. The eyes make small, jerky movements called ‘saccades’, between which there are periods called ‘fixations’. Fixations last for about a quarter of a second, while saccades are only 0.01 seconds long. It is during the fixations that information is picked up (Crowder 1982).
A line break interrupts the eye movement along the line. The reader’s eyes have to shift back to the beginning of the next line. Short lines increase the number of line breaks. If lines are too short, the reader’s eyes have to find the beginning of the next line more often than necessary, which breaks the flow of reading and makes reading tiresome (Conover 1985, Gulbins Kahrmann 1992).
On the other hand, lines that are too long also make reading difficult and tiresome. Long lines make it difficult for the reader’s eyes to follow a line and to find the beginning of the next line once a line break occurs (Conover 1985, Gulbins Kahrmann 1992).
Moreover, the optimum line width depends on the typeface and type size used. Type set in larger sizes requires longer line widths (Conover 1985, Gulbins Kahrmann 1992).
[/indent]
This is followed by a Solution section that specifies a lower limit of one-and-a-half alphabets, and an upper limit of two-and-a-half alphabets per line, along with a Discussion section that goes in to how page layout, justification, and line spacing can affect this in different subtle ways.
I’ve yet to be convinced.
Those are books rather than actual studies. What data are these books going on?
Crowder 1982 is referring to ‘The Psychology of reading’ Another book… not a study so what’s the actual reference behind the claims in the book?
Conover 1985 is: ‘Graphic Communications Today’ which is about design and he’s clearly referencing someone else for data on line lengths.
Gulbins Kahrmann 1992 is a book in german so I couldn’t really look into it, but again seems to be at best citing someone else.
These are all secondary sources. For all we know they’re all referencing each other or a single source or untested claims.
The agile documentation you referenced is a tertiary source. We don’t know how well the author(s) interpreted the conclusions from the secondary sources.
I’m not saying they’re wrong, but I’ve yet to see an actual study which suggests anything like that.
I am in my late 50s and when I was going to school I was taught to always use two spaces after a period.
Yes but you would have been taught that for use with typewriters and they use fixed width fonts. No one is saying not to use two spaces with a fixed width font - just that it doesn’t apply when the text uses fonts with different widths for different letters - and that’s what web pages normally use so that it doesn’t apply there.